


I dreamed of the fine, deep harbour I’d find

by lagardère (laurore)



Series: another new world (an academia verse) [4]
Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - After College/University, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Friends to Lovers, Glaciology, M/M, Mountaineering, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-10
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:28:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 56,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23069980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurore/pseuds/lagard%C3%A8re
Summary: Tom Hartnell falls into a crevasse.Though he wouldn’t blame anyone else for his mistakes, a case could be made that the chain of events that led him 70 feet down inside a glacier began fourteen years ago, when Cornelius Hickey talked him into stealing a bicycle.(though this is part of a pre-existing verse, this story works as a standalone)
Relationships: Thomas Hartnell/Lt John Irving
Series: another new world (an academia verse) [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1449877
Comments: 62
Kudos: 57





	I dreamed of the fine, deep harbour I’d find

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MissAntlers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissAntlers/gifts).



> As mentioned above, while this story takes place in the same verse as three previous fics (from Jopson’s, Edward’s, and Tozer’s POVs, respectively), you needn’t have read those to read this one.
> 
> (If you have read the others, I’ll point out that this story is set in June 2020, six months after the previous one, which was set in December, 2019.)
> 
> I’m not sure whether it’s worth listing all the liberties I took here, but I will mention that while John Irving was an Evangelical Christian, he belongs to the Church of Scotland in this fic.
> 
> With thanks to [theonsfavouritetoy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theonsfavouritetoy), who has been supportive of this story for the past two months even though this is neither her fandom nor her ship, and to [austrechild](https://archiveofourown.org/users/austrechild), the beta of my dreams, who should really watch The Terror. To [MissAntlers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissAntlers): heartfelt thanks for the art that prompted this story, and some measure of blame, for the same reason.

1.

Tom’s phone lights up while he’s lying on the hospital bed, alone in the room now that everyone has departed - his brother Johnny to give him “privacy”, if that was indeed the word he’d mouthed as he slowly backed out of the room; his mother to fetch coffee, the professor to fetch his mother after she’d failed to reappear and they’d deduced she’d got lost on her way to reception, and John to catch a plane to London, once he’d pulled his fancy but thoroughly rumpled trench coat back on, and stood there for a second with a haggard face, dark beard standing out against the paleness of his cheeks, and said, “If I don’t go, I’ll miss my plane.”

Johnny must have sent his flurry of texts from the vending machines in the reception area, because the first one goes, _Found mum & Crozier. Do you want shitty tomato soup in a non-recyclable cup?_

The second one, far more ominous, announces: _When I come back up WE NEED TO TALK._

And the third one lays it all out, because that’s generally the way Tom’s brother goes about things, tiptoeing for about five seconds and then kicking open the door, ruining whatever effect his earlier discretion might have had.

 _Okay but I look away for five minutes and you’ve fallen down a crevasse and almost died of hypothermia. And when we show up at the hospital, in_ France, _because couldn’t you fall down the Italian side, seriously, I find a guy crying over you - a guy whose wedding (I think??? I wasn’t there but you borrowed my suit!) you attended a few years back. Tom, what the hell._

Johnny concludes, more sedately, _Also what’s your Cambridge prof doing here?_

Tom gives himself a minute to breathe out. It seems unbelievable that John was sitting here only moments ago, wearing a loose off-white cardigan very much at odds with a suit and trench that screamed “I came straight over from my high-paying bank job and did not expect to spend three days living in a French hospital”. 

Switching on predictive typing to spare his sore fingers, Tom sends Johnny a message in return. 

_Be grateful I wasn’t climbing down the Swiss side. You couldn’t have afforded the hotel._

After another moment spent delaying the inevitable, he adds, _I can talk now. Come back up._

2.

The soup doesn’t smell of tomato, but rather of those transitory places that can’t ever be scrubbed clean, like cheap hotels or hospital halls, or those sleepy rest areas that he’d encountered along French and Italian motorways. Tom makes himself take another gulp. It feels like he’s trying to swallow tomato-flavoured coffee grounds.

“So, on a scale from one to that soup we tried to make for mum’s birthday when we were kids, the one with the weeds… How disgusting is this?” Johnny asks.

He’s appropriated John’s chair, sitting back with his feet propped up on Tom’s bed. Apparently, Francis Crozier has taken it upon himself to drive their mother back to the hotel so she can fetch her knitting bag, which Tom finds in equal measure comforting (the thought of his mother knitting) and terrifying (the thought of Crozier driving on the right hand side of the road - the thought of his former professor, temperamental, opinionated, spending another hour with Sarah Hartnell, who has her own strong opinions - and little patience for the ideas of temperamental men).

As he can’t do anything about it for the time being, however, he tries to shift his focus back to the watery soup.

“A bit disgusting,” he ventures. “It’s warm, though. A few days ago, I was dreaming of warm soup.”

“A few days ago,” Johnny repeats, dropping his feet to the floor in favour of leaning forward, elbows on his knees, his face a picture of brotherly concern. “When you were stuck in a crevasse.”

Tom doesn’t know how to explain it better, though his words fail to describe the anguish of it - he wasn’t merely dreaming of the soup, he could almost taste it, could see the bits of chicken and the carrot and parsnip and he could tell from the steam on the spoon that it would burn his tongue. People hallucinate water in deserts and he’d hallucinated his mother’s chicken broth as the cold ate away at his courage and the silence threatened to deafen him. The underside of the glacier was long blue tears and hollow black tunnels and vaulted naves, and the only sounds were the sounds of the ice melting or calving, dripping water and the occasional, frightening crack that heralded the collapse of a nearby sheet or block of ice, which Tom could only hope wouldn’t rip his ice axe from his hands, or destroy the tiny ledge upon which he stood.

It was hardly the first time he’d fallen into a crevasse, but it was the first time he felt so afraid after it happened, having to face the idea of being stuck there without any rescue in sight, grappling with the thought that, should he fail to pull himself out, bruised ribs and all, he stood a good risk of freezing to death, or of being buried alive under a cascade of ice and snow.

“I’m here, I’m fine,” he says, keeping it short so Johnny won’t hear the tremor in his voice, although some of it must have filtered through, because Johnny reaches out and squeezes his knee.

“Yeah. You are. God, you scared us half to death.”

Johnny allows him only the briefest of moments to collect himself before he forges on. 

“So can you tell me what possessed you to head out on your own on a glacier you don’t know well enough?”

“I know it. The glacier. I’ve been there many times before… When I did that exchange program at uni, and a few times since then, to collect samples with the French team. I fell because I wasn’t paying enough attention to the ice. I missed the signs.”

“You,” Johnny repeats. “You weren’t paying enough attention to the ice.”

“I was tired. The climb took longer than I thought it would and I…”

“That’s why you don’t go out there _on your own_ ,” Johnny snaps, something of the old implacability seeping into his dark eyes, that protective older brother routine. “Where was the team you were working with?”

“You know I sometimes stay behind,” Tom counters, without putting much force into it. 

He’d started climbing on his own a long time ago, around the time his brother dropped out of college and moved back home, after which they’d had little occasion to head out together. Nowadays, Tom’s job gives him occasions aplenty, drilling holes into the glaciers of Europe and Alaska and Greenland and Antarctica, and the mountains are never far away, always a few strides beyond the latest camp of whatever British or international team he happens to be working with. So he stays a few days longer. He climbs a little higher.

He can’t possibly say, _I go alone because you won’t go with me._ The pettiness has him balk and besides, it would only be half-true. It’s how it had started, but it hadn’t taken Tom a long time to figure out that he enjoyed these solo outings, for the quiet they afforded him, a welcome break from the din of the cities, of the lab, of uni life and, at times, of his own personal life, which has a tendency to spiral into chaos no matter how much he strives to keep it sparse and simple.

“What if they hadn’t found you,” Johnny says, flinging the words at him like they’re twelve and fourteen again and this is a brawl he intends to win.

“I never set out without warning anyone,” Tom argues.

Or if he did, it was in the early days. It wasn’t that he wanted to vanish, nothing like that. But he was eighteen and, for the first four or five months he spent at Cambridge, rather lonely. Sometimes it felt like he understood the ice and snow and the rocks and heather and ferns far better than he did his fellow students.

“I told the keeper of the refuge at Argentière that I was going to climb that peak,” he says. “And I told John, I always do.” As Johnny’s look becomes shrewd, he hastens to add, “It’s not… It doesn’t mean anything. He made me promise to do it, a long time ago, when he found out I liked to climb on my own. I tell him exactly where I’m going, what mountain I’m going to climb and by what route. How long I’ll be out. That kind of thing.”

He never would have thought that these messages might one day be used to rescue him. In fact, although he’s now trying to present them as a wise and pragmatic habit, he’s well aware of the main reason why he kept sending them - throughout the years and after John had left Cambridge, and got married, and they started seeing each other less and less. It was because he couldn’t bear the thought of John disappearing from his life.

And John always answers.

 _Aiguille d’Argentière up the Glacier du Milieu,_ he’d written. _Starting point refuge (4am). Back at noon._

 _I wish I could be with you,_ John had written back. _Godspeed._

Tom had pocketed his phone and tried to ignore the inane surge of joy that this message had brought about.

Johnny gives him a look that makes it clear Tom’s explanations aren’t fooling anyone.

“So what’s the deal with your posh boyfriend?”

Tom tries to glare at him, but much as he couldn’t exactly run off after Crozier and his mother, there’s little he can do to avoid this conversation either, unless he were to pretend that he’s falling asleep, a ruse Johnny would surely see through. Battered ribs won’t prevent him from pinching Tom’s arm or from trying to make him laugh.

“I don’t know where to start,” Tom admits.

“Start at the beginning.”

“I can’t believe he met mum.”

“She liked him. Said he looked smart. But she might have questions about his marital status.”

“We never… His marriage isn’t...”

“At the beginning,” Johnny reminds him. “Take slow breaths. Remember your ribs.”

Tom tries to scoff and winces in pain. 

“See?” Johnny snorts, unfairly amused.

“The beginning,” Tom murmurs, sore fingers flexing against his ribs as he tries to decide what that might have been, walking backwards through his memories, past that little French refuge where he’d spent a single night all those years ago - not a large, well-tended refuge like the one on the Argentière glacier, but a tiny cylinder perched on a high mountain pass - and then further back, past his friendship with Edward Little, past his first outing with the hillwalking club, past his first encounter with Professor Crozier.

“At the beginning,” he says, “I was trying to steal a bike.”

3\. 

“I know it sounds wild,” Cornelius had said. “And that’s precisely why I don’t want to make a scene. Get it back while she isn’t looking, and then I’ll buy a stronger lock and hopefully no one will try to steal it again. I need it to get around. Not that I don’t appreciate walking, and I’m grateful to you…” 

He nodded towards his friend Solomon, who had his nose in a medical textbook and didn’t look up. This was the way Cornelius and Solomon functioned, Tom had found out. With the one talking and the other not really giving a damn, although if you asked him a direct question, it generally turned out that he’d been paying attention.

“... but we can’t share a bike forever,” Cornelius resumed. “Sometimes we have classes at opposite ends of the campus. I did consider buying a new one, but then I decided against it... It’s a matter of principle, you know?”

“Yeah,” Magnus said, rather to punctuate Cornelius’ speech than because he had a real opinion on the subject. This was the way Cornelius and Magnus functioned, Tom had found out. With the one talking and the other blindly agreeing to everything, because he worshipped the ground Cornelius walked on.

 _Make friends,_ Johnny had told him. And really, Tom was trying.

“How can you be sure it was your bike?” he asked.

“I took it to the boat house yesterday, and when we were done rowing it was gone,” Cornelius said. The more he spoke the more he eased into his tale, so that he was starting to sound like the audiobook for a detective novel. “But then Solomon saw her crossing the bridge with it. Didn’t you?”

“Hm,” Solomon said, noncommittally.

“She’s from Corpus, their boat house is right next to ours.”

This explained why Cornelius had come to Tom about this, despite the fact that they’d hardly shared a word since the start of the year: Tom and the girl belonged to the same college. He only had a passing notion of who she was. An exchange student, from Germany or a country further up north. She was an undergrad, like the rest of them.

When Cornelius had cornered him at the end of the one class they had in common - Beginners Norwegian, 6 to 8 on Monday evenings - Tom had not really questioned his motives. There weren’t that many people in the class, it was still early in the year, and it made sense that someone as outgoing as Cornelius should want to meet new people.

“It’s a bit of a complicated story,” Cornelius had said. “But I’m sure you’ll find it interesting.”

Cornelius himself was a strange and not uninteresting figure, with his reddish-blond hair, his long nose and his pointed face, that clever dosage of lingering glances and friendly smiles. He knew how to draw attention and once he had it, he kept it clutched to his chest like a thief might cling to some priceless artefact. Everything about him had a veneer of easiness and opportunism.

So far, Cornelius had missed three out of their four language classes. The first week, he’d introduced himself to the class as a psychology undergrad, but when he’d come up to Tom at the end of the fourth class, he’d said he was studying theology.

All in all, Tom wasn’t quite sure where he stood. While he did want to socialise, he wasn’t certain that these were the people he wanted to socialise with: Cornelius with his outlandish tales of bicycle theft, Magnus who had the appearance and conversation and bewilderment of a bear woken up too soon at the end of winter, and Solomon, who was very good at complaining about everything from the quality of food at the buttery to the font in his textbook ( _Bloody illegible,_ he’d muttered, as the both of them sat there waiting for Cornelius to arrive and Tom wondered if Solomon knew that he’d never heard the word “illegible” before, and worried that maybe it had showed on his face, because Solomon’s dark eyes had briefly cut to his, and he’d almost smiled).

They were older than him and they must have been the strangest assortment of friends he’d ever come across, but Tom didn’t think he could afford to be picky.

“She could have the exact same bike,” he felt obligated to point out.

From the faint curl of Cornelius’ mouth, so soon vanished Tom might have dreamt it, he could tell that this had been the wrong thing to say.

“My bike is a bit rusty by the right handlebar. Hers is too. It’s a really good bike and my father gifted it to me on my first week here, before he went back to Ireland. It’s a vintage find.”

“What do you need me to do?”

If Cornelius asked him to get the bike for him, Tom was determined to say no.

“I need you to show me where you guys park the bikes inside Corpus,” Cornelius said. “That’s all. We could meet up tonight at 7…”

“We have an erg session,” Solomon reminded him.

“Solomon is very serious about the rowing thing,” Cornelius smiled.

“You signed us up for that,” Solomon pointed out, with what might have been a hint of a threat.

Cornelius definitely heard it.

“We do have rowing practice on the machines at the college. Well, Tom, could you meet me outside the college after that… At what, 8? We can go to Corpus together.”

“I can’t believe that girl stole your bike,” Tom said, still a bit stunned by it all, by Cornelius’ cool confidence and the sullen atmosphere around the picnic table.

“Crazy story, isn’t it?” Solomon said, idly flipping another page of his textbook.

Afterwards, Tom would convince himself that there’d been more to that quip than he’d thought at the time - that Cornelius had shot Solomon a warning glance, that Magnus’ sudden and very loud sneeze had been some sort of distraction, but if he was honest with himself, the whole thing had been fishy from the start, and he’d just been too reluctant to pick up on it.

4.

“He asked you to steal a bike?” Johnny says, with a smile of disbelief. “And you bought it? Is that the same guy who stole years of one of your professor’s research…”

“Professor Crozier’s research, yes. But that was years later. When I was in Nunavut for that expedition that ended badly.”

“ _Cornelius Hickey,_ ” Johnny snorts. “If I were him, I’d avoid drawing attention to myself. Everyone he’s ever met is bound to remember him by name alone.”

“He’s got a memorable face, too. It’s sort of his thing,” Tom says. “He knows how to… How to twist a bad thing around so he can profit from it. I think, with people like that, they lie so much and the lies are so big you can’t even believe that they’re lying. It’s too out there to be a lie. It’s different once the truth comes out of course... Then you can either call him out on his bullshit, or you pretend to believe him. His friends were very good at that. There’s this one guy, Magnus… He was there that day, when Cornelius came to me about the bike. I think he’s still friends with Cornelius today.”

“Let’s get to the good part, then.” Johnny’s eyebrows are raised in expectation. “Did you steal the bike?”

5.

This Tom leaves out of the tale: the night of the attempted bike theft was also the night he met John Irving.

There are stories he doesn’t really have the words to tell properly. And there’s also bits and pieces that he’d like to keep to himself, like that moment where he crossed the college green on his way to the gym, looking for Cornelius who was, unsurprisingly maybe, very late to their meeting, and he heard a peremptory voice calling out to him.

“Hey, you over there! Step off the grass!”

Tom hastened to do so before he could understand what he’d done wrong. The call had come from the nearby footpath, where he could make out two dark-haired students in the gathering gloom. 

“You can’t cross the green unless you’re a fellow, or accompanied by a fellow,” the first of the two boys said. “You’re not a fellow, are you?”

“I didn’t know. If there was a sign, I didn’t…”

“It’s common knowledge,” the boy said.

The other one wore an expression somewhere between resignation and thorough exhaustion.

“Are you looking for something?” he asked. “Can we help?”

“I’m looking for the gym. For Cornelius Hickey?”

Apparently that was the wrong thing to say.

“Hickey,” the first boy repeated, wide-eyed. He wouldn’t have looked more outraged if he’d caught Tom setting fire to the lawn.

“We just saw him, he’ll be out in a minute,” the second one said, and readjusting the sports bag slung over his shoulder, he took the first boy by the arm. “Come on, let’s go get dinner. Have a nice one,” he added, for Tom’s benefit.

“You too,” Tom said, faintly puzzled.

Indeed Cornelius appeared shortly after that, as if he’d been waiting in the wings for his cue.

“Talking to the upper crust, were you?” he said lightly, as he finished buttoning his sheepskin jacket. “These guys can’t stand me.”

“Why?” Tom asked.

Cornelius seemed surprised to have the question put to him.

“Was one of them angry at you? That was John Irving. He doesn’t take kindly to our sort.”

“Our sort?” Tom frowned. “Do you mean… bursary students?”

Cornelius lifted a fine eyebrow.

“Queer people.”

Tom stared at him. It must have been obvious that he was confused rather than angry, because Cornelius reached up to give his shoulder a pat, with a pacifying smile.

“Forget about it, friend. Pretend I didn’t say anything. Let’s go get that bike.”

 _This is how it all started,_ Tom could say, though at the time, the encounter had seemed completely void of meaning. If he remembered it at all, it was because it had been absurd, and maybe a tad shameful, and it was only years later that he dared to remind John of it, _That time you shouted at me because I’d walked on the lawn, I’m sure you don’t remember,_ and John looked up from where he’d been fiddling with the stove, cheeks still red from the cold, beard flecked with snow, wearing that green cable-knit jumper that made him look a lot softer than he usually was.

 _Of course I remember,_ he said. _You had a red scarf. You looked completely lost, metaphorically and otherwise. I was a bit of a prick, wasn’t I?_

6.

“Here,” Johnny says, tipping the glass of water towards his lips.

Tom takes a grateful sip.

“When I got out,” he says, in a steadier voice, “My hands wouldn’t cooperate. I had water left in my canteen but I couldn’t reach it, let alone open it. After the whole ordeal… the fall, and having to drag myself back out… It felt unfair, you know? I thought I’d be relieved to be out. That I’d take a moment to enjoy the stars and the quiet. But in that moment…” He swallows another mouthful, with a small smile of thanks. “It felt like I’d accomplished nothing. I was out of that crevasse, but I was still going to die far away from the lot of you.”

He always knew the risks, for they are as much a part of his job as the lab work, the constant travelling, that background noise of a clock ticking down towards the disappearance of every glacier on earth. One can’t be a glaciologist and steer clear of crevasses. But back there on the glacier of Argentière, he’d been struck by the futility of it. All that fighting that amounted to nothing. It used to be what he loved about mountaineering, that it made every other struggle recede into a background of petty concerns, and yet as he stumbled away from the crevasse, it had frightened him.

“There’s as much water as you need,” Johnny murmurs, far more subdued than he usually would be, and Tom makes himself focus on his brother’s kind eyes, on his tentative smile. He accepts another sip.

Over time, they have come to learn how to tell when the other is in dire need of a change of subject.

“Do you remember Thomas Blanky?” Tom asks.

“The glaciologist with the shaggy grey hair. Of course I remember. We had dinner with him and his wife at that place in London. Weirdest triple date ever. When was that, three years ago?”

“It wasn’t meant to be a ‘triple date’,” Tom reminds him. “You told me you were bringing Maya, Blanky was bringing his wife, and I…”

“Brought Roland the Artist.”

“... Panicked,” Tom finishes weakly.

“Oh, I had the time of my life,” Johnny snorts. “I wish I could remember his speeches word for word. Something about how drones are a window into the soul of our post-technocratic age? And we’re all really like lobsters in a tank, and the only way to feel alive is to lie down in the mud and make art in the shape of our naked bodies, like the worms we truly are. Except we’re not worms or lobsters but basically a bunch of bugging harddrives. Oh, Roland. He was intense.”

“That’s a bit of a caricature, don’t you think?,” Tom says, although his ears are burning and his memories of that evening also run rather along those lines, except he’s quite sure it was crabs and not lobsters, if only because Land had picked one up to prove his point, and Tom remembers the tone in which Blanky had told him to “Put the crab down, son,” with no small amount of suppressed laughter.

Land had chosen his nickname in accordance with his affinity for land art, a fact which Johnny found hilarious and which Tom had refrained from commenting upon during their two-year relationship. They’d met over the course of a research project between the Department of Geography at Cambridge University, the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford and the Icelandic Meteorological Office. Land’s part in the project was to blend together old images of Icelandic glaciers with more recent pictures to illustrate the rapid rate at which they were disappearing. Regardless of how his relationship with Land had turned out, Tom had believed in the project, and some of those pictures are still on the walls of the lab in Cambridge. He’d drawn the line at keeping them in his flat. At home, he’s put up a few pictures on a similar theme by some famous Icelandic artist that Edward Little had gifted him on his birthday, which was as close as polite, quiet Edward would ever get to saying what he’d thought of Land, which had been, not much, not much at all.

“Any idea how he’s doing these days?” Johnny asks.

Tom allows the question because Johnny is merely being curious, contrary to his mother, whose pointed enquiries generally hide a double-entendre, of the _Any chance we might see him again?_ variety.

“We’re still friends on Facebook. I think he’s… working with water. Filming rivers. Something like that.”

Tom had always felt faintly inadequate when he was around Land, like Land was grasping at some higher meaning that he could never hope to attain. But he wasn’t so naive that he couldn’t tell there was another way to look at Land’s approach to art and nature, where maybe it was Land, and not society, who put up so many screens between himself and the world that his work became the contrary of what he wanted it to say.

“Maybe he should have stuck to making mouldings of his bare…”

“Johnny.”

“Sorry. How did we even get to talking about Roland?”

“Blanky,” Tom reminds him, without trying to keep the exhaustion from his voice. “I was trying to… I wanted to get us back on track. Blanky’s part of my college, and that day… I’d shown Cornelius where the bikes were, and he had me... Holding my phone, as a flashlight, and he was crouched by the bike and cutting the lock apart, and Crozier and Blanky walked by.”

“Bummer.”

“It’s probably better that they did, or we’d have got away with it.”

Though he finds it easy to say this now, it hadn’t seemed so obvious at the time, as he stood there frozen and Crozier and Blanky stared at them - they must have come out from dinner and were still wearing their gowns, and Crozier had a tumbler of some alcohol or other in hand, as if he needed to fortify himself ahead of the ten-minute walk to his college. That was before Crozier took steps to curb his drinking problem, and it would take Tom years to grasp what the magnitude of the problem had been.

“Gentlemen,” Crozier had said.

“Professor Crozier, sir,” Cornelius replied, with perfect aplomb, although his hands were black with grease and the broken lock in his hands left little to the imagination.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been more humiliated in my life,” Tom tells Johnny, and means it, because until then, every mistake he’d ever made had been made in good faith, but as he withstood a firm interrogation in Blanky’s office over the half-hour that followed, he found he couldn’t really account for his own actions. It seemed a poor excuse to say that Cornelius had sounded convincing, and that he’d wanted to stop having lunch alone on the stairs outside the Department of Criminology. 

Cornelius kept up the story of the stolen bike until he abruptly changed his tune and admitted that he might have been mistaken, maybe the bike wasn’t his, maybe his actions had been too rash, and they needn’t fetch the girl, he’d buy her a new lock, surely this needn’t show up in his record.

For three weeks running, Tom and Cornelius were tasked with keeping the bicycle racks clean and well-tended in both their colleges, a gruelling task at the start of autumn, with all the leaves both dead and dying that kept sticking to the racks and the wheels. Technically, Tom was asked to do it for one week only - to quote Crozier, _It was painfully obvious that you were not the mastermind behind this disappointing affair_ \- but he felt bad enough about it all that he kept joining Cornelius every morning with his broom and rake until Crozier let them off the hook.

“But the worst thing about it,” he says, “is that we did get away with it.” 

If his throat clenches with the admission, if he finds it hard to get the words past his lips, it has nothing to do with his dehydrated body and his aching ribs. 

“Sometimes I think Cornelius did it on purpose, although I don’t really know how he could have managed that, it’s not like he could know that Crozier would walk by, and if he had, you’d think he’d have planned something that made him look better than a bicycle thief. But at any rate… A month after that maybe, he was sitting in on one of Crozier’s anthropology courses, and I went to one of Blanky’s conferences one evening and he recognised me. Kept me at the end of it, asked me why I was interested in glaciers. Cornelius’ little stunt… It put us on the map, so to speak.”

“Nonsense,” Johnny scoffs, reaching out to give his knee a little rub. “You put yourself on the map, with hard work and a lot of courage. Don’t think I don’t know that. Don’t think either of your professors don’t know that. I don’t think Crozier would have flown here otherwise. Your bicycle story… It’s a good story, but it’s not one of those morality tales. It’s just a thing that happened, yeah? Maybe you should have known better. But as far as I can tell, you atoned for it ten times over.”

Tom doesn’t agree, but he doesn’t have it in him to dispute the point, either, and their conversation is soon cut short by the return of Crozier and Sarah Hartnell, the first carrying the knitting bag, the second boxes of take-out.

“We thought we’d have dinner here, if you’re not too tired of the company, that is,” Crozier announces, the Irish lull of his voice as soothing as ever. Pulling a chair towards the bed, he folds his tall frame inside it, in a way that somehow makes him look both like a benevolent, unassuming guardian, and like an ailing lion who’ll paw your head off should you come too close.

“Of course not,” Tom blusters. “I’m just… I’m really grateful that you all came.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, sweetheart,” his mother pipes up from her own chair, where she’s peering at the early stages of a garish purple scarf that Tom has a sinking suspicion will end up around his neck. “I’ve seen what you looked like the last time I left you in this country for too long. I intend to stay until I’m sure you’re eating properly.”

“And I’ve got questions,” Johnny adds, rubbing his jaw as if he were stroking an imaginary beard. It doesn’t make him look like John in the least - Johnny’s sprawled in the chair where John would be sitting up straight, his face is all dimples and laughter lines where John is so often serious that Tom has learned to identify every one of his smiles, the better to provoke them in the right setting, at the right time.

But Johnny’s meaning is clear nonetheless. _You might think you’ve created a good diversion with that story,_ the raised eyebrows are saying. _Just wait until we get a minute alone,_ adds the lazy grin. _I’ll get the truth out of you._

“Could I get another glass of water?” Tom asks, his voice weary with resignation.

7.

_How are you?_ The message reads. 

This and nothing more, but then again, they’ve always been sparse with their words, the both of them. Tom feels like he doesn’t have enough of them, never so much as when he spends time around some of his friends from Cambridge, Edward and John and Graham, who have been taught from birth to use words to pass along a message of cultured influence, of polished charm. If John isn’t profligate in writing, it has little to do with a lack of words. In the gaps between the words, Tom hears the weight of John’s silences, can almost see him thinking, worrying, assessing the situation. When he speaks, he often speaks too fast, his tone too assertive, like he’s forever anticipating a rebuke.

 _Alright, tired,_ he answers. _You?_

 _Fine,_ John writes, though he must know how blatant the lie will be, because another message soon follows.

_I meant everything I said._

_I know,_ Tom writes back, and wonders if John can also tell that he’s lying. A part of him had been wondering if he hadn’t dreamt the whole thing, conjured John up from the depths of his tired brain. 

A part of him is still stuck down in that crevasse, looking up at the sky and thinking he’ll never get back out. The idea of ever being able to see John again had seemed preposterous at the time, and finding him by his bedside at the ER, only a few hours after they brought him in, had felt equally absurd, a cruel twist of fate, a final send-off perhaps. For the first two days after he was rescued he’d been fairly out of it, body fighting hard to recuperate, brain on stand-by, but whenever he emerged, never for more than a few minutes at a time, John was there in the room, and Tom never went back to sleep until he’d found him, napping awkwardly in a chair in that cardigan with the heel of an Oxford shoe propped upon the steel bed frame, or standing in a corner with a plastic cup of coffee between his hands, making himself scarce as Tom’s mother and brother buzzed about the room.

His phone blinks another message at him.

_You could call me tomorrow, if you feel like it? Get some rest._

The hospital is silent. Outside Tom’s window, it’s still the mountains, casting their shadows over the valley, hemming a sky that is bound to be the same sky that he was reaching towards what seems like a few hours ago, with his axe and his aching arms and his cold, cold hands. From his bed however, all he can see is another row of buildings, lit up by the orange glow of a streetlamp. He is so tired it feels as if the only thing keeping him awake is the light outside, for as long as he can bear to look at it.

John’s final message comes a full fifteen minutes later.

_We see the same stars._

8.

Crozier has booked a flight later in the morning. Once visiting hours have resumed he is the first to appear in Tom’s room, wearing a tired trench coat over a tired jumper the dark green of ivy or fir trees. He takes his post at Tom’s side and for a while they don’t talk at all, soaking in the timid sunshine, Tom eating the last of the yoghurt they gave him for breakfast. The doctor came by and for the most part, he sounded optimistic. They’ve pumped him full of pain medication and antibiotics and the ache in his ribs has abated for the time being, as has the painful bruise across his cheek, from where his face glanced against the ice as he fell.

Crozier had tried to help him eat but he’d politely declined, despite the doctor’s continued advice that he avoid using his hands as much as he could. Contrary to his toes, his hands aren’t discoloured. The tips of his fingers were white when they brought him in, and by the next day they’d turned an angry red, but by now they’ve returned to their usual paleness, though they remain a bit tender and stiff.

The nurse’s face had barely registered any expression as she changed the bandages around his feet, but Tom had caught the slight pinch between her eyebrows, and a glimpse of black before she wrapped the fresh gauze around his toes. He’d felt his heart falter for a second, the blood draining from his face, his hands falling limp upon the sheets as if his recovery had been nothing more than a feverish dream. 

_It is not as bad as it looks,_ the doctor had said, in his heavily accented English. _There is no damage to the muscles or the nerves. If you had stayed longer outside, it would have been a lot worse. I don’t teach you anything when I say you will need months to recover. No walking for now. You must rest._

Tom suspects this is why Crozier stayed another day - to hear that verdict, to make sure before he left that Tom wasn’t going to undergo an amputation of one or several of his toes. They both know one person to whom this had happened, and though Blanky is in the Himalayas, Tom has no doubt Crozier is keeping him updated on the situation.

He’ll be in for a hell of a scolding when Blanky returns.

“Do you know it’ll have melted in a few decades?” Tom asks, taking a careful sip of his grapefruit juice. 

“The glacier you were on?” Crozier asks, looking up at him from above the gardening magazine that his mother had left behind.

“Yes, the Argentière glacier. At the rate it’s disappearing, it’ll be gone by 2080.”

“Is it affecting the crevasses? Global warming?”

“Yes, of course. The crevasses, the ice, the rocks, the ecosystems of the area. Touristic infrastructures.”

“I can’t imagine a world without ice. How barren it would look,” Crozier muses, turning another page. The magazine is open flat on his knees and from his bed Tom can make out the title of the article that Crozier is reading, _Bientôt la saison des artichauts!_

Tom considers asking him, for a foolish second, whether he’s been thinking of getting himself a garden. Much like everyone else in Crozier’s various circles, he knows that his professor, whose fiftieth birthday they’d celebrated a couple years ago, owns a sad little flat in Cambridge that he never bothered to properly occupy. Crozier spends most of his time living at his partner’s house. 

Tom has it from Edward, a polar geographer and protégé of Crozier’s, that James had proposed to Crozier the previous winter. He has it from Sophia, a polar biologist and close friend of Crozier’s, that Crozier had found the idea ridiculous, and had told James as much, before he agreed to it - on the condition that no one should know ahead of the wedding.

The wedding has yet to take place and Tom has a strong suspicion that the entire university is in the know, but he won’t be the one to break it to Crozier.

“That’s where you did your Masters, wasn’t it?” Crozier says.

“Grenoble, yes. Not quite here. But near enough. I did a Masters in Cambridge too, but I came over and did a second one here. The lab is famous for its collection of ice samples. They make their own core drills.”

“Your French must be excellent.”

Tom looks down at his hands with an apologetic smile.

“I’m afraid it isn’t.”

If Johnny had been here, he’d have made an embarrassing comment about Tom’s French boyfriend, Max, whom he’d met at the lab and whom he kept dating until the end of his Masters, when a long research trip to Antarctica had finally led them to call it quits. Tom had experienced that break-up like a premonition of every relationship to come: honest and committed attempts defeated by distance and the constraints of a job that would always come first. And Max had belonged to the same field as Tom, which had begged the question, if he couldn’t make it work with someone who had the same work ethic and way of life, who might possibly want to take him on?

Momentarily he feels grateful for Johnny’s absence. There’s only so much public reminiscing that he can take. Especially considering the fact that...

“Your friend said that you two used to go hiking around here,” Crozier says, placing the magazine back on the bedside table.

“My friend,” Tom flounders.

“John Irving. Your friend who is also Edward’s friend. What is he, a lawyer? The CEO of a tech firm?” 

Tom is familiar with that sarcastic tone, having discovered a long time ago that the professor means it as friendly banter and not as an insult.

“He works in a bank. We did go hiking around here, when we were younger.”

Crozier snorts.

“You’re still young, the both of you. That’s a whole life ahead of you, Mr Hartnell, if you don’t break your neck before your next birthday.”

“Duly noted, sir.”

“Speaking of which… I have a promise to extract from you. At Professor Blanky’s request, though I must say that I agree with him.” 

Crozier’s tone is the same, but his pale blue eyes have a glint of steel, and Tom is reminded, uncomfortably, of being eighteen and in the wrong, standing by that bike rack with his phone lighting up Cornelius’ narrow face and his dexterous fingers. Years later, on the one occasion where he’d dared to bring up the subject with Crozier, Crozier had only paused long enough to scoff before he’d resumed loading Tom’s arms with the stapled lists of sources for an upcoming symposium.

 _The only thing that surprised me about this whole affair,_ Crozier had said, _was that he had you hold the torch, and not steal the bike in his place._ And with that he’d moved on, _Do you think we should add Edward to the line-up in the afternoon? He should be back from Greenland by then._

“No more of these solo outings,” Crozier tells him, with narrowed eyes.

Smiling in spite of himself, Tom attempts to sit up against his pillow.

“Yes, sir.”

Crozier shakes his head.

“Heaven’s sake. At ease, son. Get some bloody rest, doctor’s orders. And the next time I call your mother to get some news of your recovery, I hope they’ll tell me they’ve confiscated your phone and they’ve found a way to feed you that doesn’t require you wielding a knife.”

“I need you to know that I’m very grateful that…”

“Not another word,” Crozier warns. “Do you have anything around here that’s not in French? I’d read you a page or two, but I’m willing to bet my French is rustier than yours, and the resulting laughter won’t be tender on your ribs.”

Tom had brought one book along for this trip, the account of a Scottish woman’s wanderings in the Cairngorm range. As always, the book is full of notes and sketches and receipts, of phone numbers and train tickets. Since university, Tom has had a tendency to treat his books as travel diaries. Crozier doesn’t comment on it, flipping past the inscription on the opening page ( _Someday you’ll have to come north, and by north I mean Scotland, not the Arctic. Happy birthday, J. Irving_ ), flipping past Tom’s hastily drawn itinerary for the climb up the Aiguille d’Argentière, flipping past the introduction so he can begin with the text itself.

“There are worse books to take down a crevasse,” Crozier remarks, and starts to read.

9.

When Tom wakes up, Crozier’s chair is empty. He has left the book on top of the gardening magazine on the bedside table.

“He said you were knackered, and he doesn’t take it personally,” Johnny’s voice rises from the other side of the bed, where he’s hunched over a pile of quizzes. Even from afar, Tom can tell from the amount of red on the page that this particular pupil won’t get a passing grade.

“I knew he had a tendency to go above and beyond for the people he cared about,” Tom says. “I just wouldn’t have thought I was one of these people.”

Johnny makes a pained sound.

“And there lies the problem, doesn’t it? You never do. You never think people might care and therefore, I might add, _worry_ about you. Speaking of...”

“Where is she?”

“I bribed her to get some time alone with you. She’s having the hot chocolate of her life on the terrace of the hotel. If she’s not here in a couple hours, maybe I’ll set out to rescue her, or send the guys who rescued you - obviously they’re good.” He leans down to shove the pile of quizzes back inside his satchel. “Where were we?”

It’s been on Tom’s mind since he woke up that morning - before Crozier arrived, when it was only the clean little hospital room and the morning dew on his sunny window - to ask if anyone has had the presence of mind to take down the names of those who’d found him on the glacier, but he’s held back by the discomforting idea that should he seek them out, they’ll have nothing but harsh words about his imprudence.

“The story of how I accidentally got into glaciology.”

“Right. Well, I’m not saying it was a bad story,” Johnny says, reaching down to grab the coffee cup at his feet. “You know I love to listen to your glacier talk. You have the coolest job in the world. Depressing, but cool - the pun here was unintended...” He pauses to take a prolonged sip before he sinks back against the chair, one leg thrown over the other, with a look in his eye that means nothing but trouble. “... But we both know that’s not what I want to hear about. It is rather sad, isn’t it? You can try every angle you like, climate change will never be as fascinating as your sex life.”

“Oh my god,” Tom mumbles.

“Harsh truths.”

“I am certainly _not_ telling you anything about…”

“Tell me about the guy, Thomas.”

Once again, Tom is at a loss where to start. What to share. Yet underneath it all there’s also a spark of - relief? Excitement? It comes as a surprise to realise that he does want to tell this story. After all, it has been sitting on his chest for a very long time.

“We met in Cambridge. We weren’t really… We weren’t close, back then. But we had friends in common, and we were both part of the hillwalking club.” 

10.

Tom had applied to Cambridge for two reasons. One of these was personal, the other practical. 

The first was that Johnny had chosen Cambridge, and every holiday saw him come back with tales of his historian friends and how they spent entire evenings remaking the world behind the foggy windows of ancient pubs, knocking back pints of lager in wood-panelled rooms, smoking the night away by the riverside. Johnny’s descriptions of Cambridge were an amateur historian’s descriptions, as if the university had stayed stuck somewhere between the two world wars, and in all fairness, maybe it had. Those sepia tones had appealed to Tom, who sometimes felt like he’d been born in the wrong era, not because of some misplaced idealisation of the past, but because the world moved and thought and flashed too fast for him to follow.

The second reason was that since Johnny had been accepted at Cambridge, Tom and Johnny’s school had reasonable faith that they could manage to send another student there, signing him up for the same scholarships as his brother, stopping short from having him apply to the same faculty.

And thus he arrived in Cambridge, thoroughly used to following in Johnny’s footsteps, having never had any reason to think twice about it, and after about a month there, after Johnny had showed him around and Tom had had time to notice how well-integrated he was, how clever his friends and thought-provoking his teachers and well-furbished the libraries and well-tended the gardens and the kitchens and even Johnny’s room where someone dropped by every other week to pick up his laundry and change his bedsheets - Johnny dropped out.

He did it like he did everything, without much of a fuss, but without shying away from the implications of his decision, and by the time Tom had sat at that table with Cornelius and his friends and listened to Cornelius’ bicycle tale, Johnny was back home in Kent waiting tables at a cafe.

At the time, Tom had thought his brother had gone mad. It seemed like a waste of his abilities, and a waste of the opportunity that had been given to them.

Johnny and him had always been alike, however. It wasn’t visible at first glance - they were both tall but Johnny took after their mother while Tom had inherited his father’s fair hair and his long face, and he didn’t laugh as readily as Johnny, didn’t make up his mind so easily, though once he had, the both of them could be as stubborn as a pair of similarly-sized but not quite identical mules. They had always shared the same outlook on life, which could have been summed up as, “be kind and remember to hear people out” (a piece of fatherly advice) and “clarity goes a long way to help you avoid making a mess of things”, an oft-repeated saying of their mother’s. 

It was unsurprising that they should have had the same experience of Cambridge, as a bewildering whirlwind.

When Tom began to feel the faintest stirrings of understanding, and he couldn’t say what did it, exactly, the decorum of those wasteful dinners that his friends at Corpus wanted to attend every week, or the way he sometimes lost track of time after a few days at the library and emerged from a paper to discover a volcano had erupted somewhere and if he hadn’t used a discarded newspaper to wipe up a coffee spill he might never have found out, or maybe all those parties where he felt hopelessly out of place; whatever it was, he decided that he needed an outlet.

That’s what the hillwalking club was supposed to be, originally. That’s what mountaineering was supposed to be: a temporary breather, a parenthesis from his life and his work. And instead, gradually, it came to be the one thing in his life that rang true.

11.

Though he’d signed up alongside someone else, Tom couldn’t say what the guy’s name had been. Another first-year geography student, a burly dark-haired boy who talked too much, who’d made friends with everyone on the first outing and who never showed up again. Months later people were still asking Tom about him. _What’s his name, the fun guy. Is he coming back?_ To which Tom gave inconclusive answers, _Maybe, I don’t know, I’ll ask him,_ although they’d hardly ever spoken again after that first day. The boy would greet him loudly at the library every time they ran into each other, causing a concert of outraged shushing from the aisles, but for the most part he’d found himself a more fashionable circle of friends who’d welcomed him with open arms. Tom didn’t drink enough or party loudly enough to be a part of their crowd, especially during that first year, when he was still struggling to understand how he was supposed to work and eat and sleep and attend parties without any of these activities impeding the others.

For the same reasons, he didn’t attend every outing of the hillwalking club, but he did join in often enough that after a few walks, he began to get the hang of it. Not of the walking, which had never been much of an issue to begin with, but of the club itself, with its group dynamics and the pronounced individuality of its various members, its rituals of the pre-walk drive in a borrowed minivan and the after-walk pint and the group pictures in ridiculous poses on top of barren hills and the picnics during which everyone brought their own sandwich but Noriko the law undergrad would always pass around a pack of green tea Matcha KitKats. 

There was the ruling duo of James Fitzjames and “Dundy” Le Vesconte, who were respectively president and vice-president of the club three years running until other commitments took over - a semester in China on James’ side, and the preparation of an expedition to the Arctic on Dundy’s. Until the expedition in question, Tom had always got along well with Dundy, a tall, sharp-faced guy with prematurely silver hair who had the kind of aristocratic poise that could put a group of strangers at ease, and give you the impression, though he was talking to five people at the same time, that you were the only relevant person in the room. The hillwalking club had also led Tom to believe that Dundy could handle any messy situation, as he’d seen him pilot groups of students in the foulest weather and on the harshest kind of terrain, through impenetrable fogs and down slopes of scree, and there’d been the time when he’d kept everyone’s spirits up as they waited out a storm in a cave, and the time him and James had carried a girl down a mountain after she’d sprained her ankle.

Maybe it was due to James’ absence, but in the Arctic Dundy was nothing like the clear-headed, reliable and sometimes boastful figure Tom had come to appreciate in three years of walking the British Isles together.

( _But that’s not what you want to hear about, isn’t it? You don’t really care about the Arctic expedition._ )

( _You make me sound soulless. Of course I care about the time your entire expedition went feral and one guy got shot in the leg and you and Edward had to drive him across the ice to the nearest outpost. But it’s also worth pointing out that while that story seemed wild when it happened, since then you’ve been to Antarctica a bunch of times and you also just climbed out of a crevasse. Your entire life is one wild anecdote, Tom. Can we get back to the hiking club?_ )

James and Dundy were the life of the club, two long-legged postgrads with stories to while away the cold and signal-less evenings in the hostels the club booked for its week-end trips. On such evenings there was also the board game contingent, where Charlotte would kill everyone at Jenga... ( _The same Charlotte that you dated for a few months?_ ) … until her and Tom broke up and after that, they civilly decided to attend different club outings for a while, though they both joined that ski trip sometime during their third year, and by that point she was seeing Dundy, or sleeping with Dundy; Tom didn’t really care to figure it out.

During the walks, everyone would split up according to paces and climbing abilities, with a group for those who liked to walk and talk and make frequent breaks, a medium group for those who had at least a passing intention to summit something before the day was over, and a group for those who wanted to scramble, who had no interest in conversation, and who would be able to keep up with James’ long strides for hours on end. James didn’t believe in breaks.

If the trip lasted overnight, the people in the hard-walking group could often be found pouring over maps in the evenings, shoving aside mugs and plates to trace the itinerary they would take in the morning, when they would start out several hours before the other groups.

Tom belonged to that group, and so did John. 

As a consequence, Tom’s initial idea of John was very much tied to these walks. He knew that John walked fast, that he never complained. When he did tire, however, he would grow silent and withdrawn, and if the walk went on for too long, he’d finish it in a daze and skip the celebratory drinks at the end of it. 

Though he avoided driving after the walks, he could always be counted upon to drive the van on the way out. During an overnight trip, he was often the first up to help with the dishes. 

He had a reputation for being serious and uncompromising, and for being “something of a competitive asshole”, in the words of one of Tom’s classmates whose boat had tied with John’s in a race, and who claimed that John had sought him out after the race and punched him in the face. Granted, the accounts of that incident differed from one person to the next. In the strangest version Tom had heard, it had been the other guy who’d started the fight after he’d been heckled on the river by the cox of John’s boat. This version Tom couldn’t help but find believable, seeing as the cox in question was Cornelius, and it seemed like typical Cornelius behaviour to have a crewmate take punches in his place.

Be that as it may, it was a fact that John was passionate about rowing. Certainly he was invested in the hillwalking club, and he was a fairly active member of some art club and he’d also started some weird gathering of Scottish students that may or may not have been a prayer group. But first and foremost, he was the captain of the fastest boat in his college, and anyone who spent five minutes in his company was likely to depart with at least that vital piece of information. It wasn’t rare for him to skip two or three walks in a row because they were in conflict with his rowing schedule. 

There were other people in the club whom Tom got along with at the time, Noriko and Charlotte and some of the people in the hard-walking group, like Harry whose backpack was always full of books and Clementine who was a foot shorter than Tom but who still managed to outpace him, her legs working double time. The year James left for China, it was Clementine who replaced him as club president, and Tom was her vice-president for a year, until he left for France.

It wasn’t that he didn’t get along with John, but they never really bonded on those walks. On Tom’s side it might have had to do with John’s standoffish behaviour, that mixture of self-righteousness and brisk confidence, and how everything about him, from his posture to his clothes to the way he called everyone by their last names, like maybe they’d all gone to the same posh school together, seemed to erect some sort of barrier that Tom had neither the ability nor the desire to vault over.

Even then, however, he hadn’t put much stock in the “competitive asshole” portrait that had been painted to him. There was John’s consummate politeness, his readiness to take his share of whatever chore was at hand. There was the time they ran into a German family lost in the Brecon Beacons, and John spent more than an hour trying to help them figure out where they were and where they should go, despite the fact that neither him nor Tom nor whomever else was with them at the time could speak a word of German beyond the absolute basics of Danke and Guten Tag.

And there was that chance conversation at the end of Tom’s second year, when he found himself seated next to John at a club social and searched in quiet desperation for something to say. Eventually, he started to tell John about his plans for the week-end, which included a trip to Snowdonia in a rented car so he could climb a mountain or two. John had looked at him for a very long time, eyes blue and bright, dark brows faintly furrowed, and then he’d asked him, “But did you tell anyone?”

“I’m telling you,” Tom had answered, not quite understanding at first.

“I mean telling someone exactly where you’re going,” John elaborated, with an impatient gesture that was less a sign of irritation than of inebriation. The pint glass at his elbow was almost empty. He’d come straight over from the boat club and was still wearing his splash jacket, with the coat of arms of his college stitched on the front. “In case something happens to you?”

“I’ll be careful,” Tom ventured. At the time, he was inclined to think that John doubted his climbing skills, and he was trying to decide if he should be offended or not.

Meanwhile John had pulled out a black notebook that turned out to be his weekly planner. 

“Fine then. Tell me exactly where you’ll be, and when, and what time you expect to be back.”

12.

“He had a point,” Johnny remarks. “You were being a bloody idiot.”

“I didn’t… I was very young.”

“I don’t think age has made you a lot more cautious, judging from the fact that we’re currently in a hospital. This being said.” Johnny clears his throat. “I know that… I told myself you’d be okay, when I left uni. You’d always been… A happy kid. Sociable. I didn’t want to consider that it might be hard on you. That I was abandoning you, maybe. And that was cruel. Like dropping a child in a pool so they have to figure out how to swim, because it’s either that or they’ll drown. It might be too late to apologise for that, but I...”

“You were right though,” Tom points out gently. “I was a happy kid, and I did make friends. I just had to get past that acclimatisation process.”

He’d put some thought into it at the time: what life would have been like, if Johnny had stayed. Especially in the early days. Would he have joined the club as well? Would he have befriended everyone there, with his loud, contagious laughter?

After a while, Tom stopped wondering. There came a point where it became impossible to consider an alternate reality, because Johnny had just missed too much, and eventually Tom found out, to his own surprise, that Cambridge could be his as thoroughly as it had been Johnny’s - that he could have a life completely separate from his brother’s, which Johnny need not necessarily know about.

And for all that he thought that John’s habit of calling everyone by their last name was pointless and strange, a part of Tom did secretly draw comfort from being called “Hartnell”. As if, for perhaps the first time in his life, he was the Hartnell people met first, and remembered.

“After that, John… I still called him Irving at the time. He left Cambridge, to go to LSE. He’d been accepted for a PhD in Statistics - he never finished it; he was poached by a bank along the way. I don’t think we’d have kept track of each other if there hadn’t been those messages. There’s something really circumstantial about friendships, isn’t there? I suppose I’d have got word of John from Edward if we’d lost touch. They went to school together.”

 _Edward was a witness at John’s wedding,_ he almost adds. Eventually, he’ll have to get to that. 

Eventually, but not just yet. 

13.

There were other sides to John Irving’s Cambridge years that Tom left out of his account. He never promised to give a complete picture.

Even for someone as uninterested in gossip as Tom had been, it was impossible to avoid the hearsay.

John was devout, John was a homophobe. John couldn’t hold his drink. John was a stick-in-the-mud.

Most of these unflattering takes came from Cornelius, and as such Tom knew to take them with a grain of salt. He was well-placed to know that Cornelius could deliver enormous lies and not think twice about it. It wasn’t so much that he was immoral, but rather that he had no morals at all.

In this Cornelius was right however, that John had so many morals it would have been impossible for anyone to contend with them all. John believed in strict schedules, in giving one’s utmost, in filling one’s time with activities that strengthened the body and the soul, by which he certainly did not mean drinking or, god forbid, sleeping around, but rather rowing and climbing and getting to the top of a mountain ahead of everyone else so that he might sketch the view with a battered box of watercolour pencils. Tom had picked up on that box at the time, because it aligned with the rest of John’s hillwalking demeanour. In Cambridge, John’s outfits and his hair and his posture were so impeccable he might have walked straight out of whatever expensive shop you went to in order to buy the picture-perfect heir to an old estate. But the John Irving of the hillwalking group was a distinct variation on that theme, one whose guernseys had been bleached by the sun and pulled out of shape by the rain, the elbows rubbed thin by the rocks; whose hair had been maligned by winds that didn’t care much for hairspray or combs, whose boots were obviously cared for, but starting to show the discolouration of one too many muddy puddles, with heather tangled in the laces, some of the rubber peeling off at the toes.

(Later, this became a memory that Tom reframed and clung to - John Irving patiently drawing on a hilltop, with flowers caught in the laces of his boots.)

John wasn’t the easiest person to have a conversation with if you didn’t come from his world, where inherited wealth was counterbalanced by a stifling personal rigour that might indeed have had something to do with his religious beliefs (Tom only had the faintest understanding of what the Church of Scotland was back then, but he did know it was far more austere than the Church of England or its episcopalian equivalent in Scotland). Yet it would have been pushing it to call him boring or dull or intolerant. If John had issues tolerating Cornelius, it probably had more to do with Cornelius’ general character and behaviour than with his sexual proclivities.

As for the drinking, it was a well-known fact that John didn’t drink much, and that when he did, it went straight to his head. Half a pint of stout and he’d be tipsy, a glass of wine and he’d burst into song. By the end of the night, whichever row crew member was closest would have to walk him back to their college and everyone had heard of the time Solomon Tozer tried to cycle the both of them home on Irving’s bicycle, and Irving jumped off the bike along the way, sending Solomon crashing into a fence, because he’d decided to throw up in the middle of the marketplace.

Everyone had such university stories, and Tom would have been hard pressed to judge John for it when he himself lacked the memories of a few rowdy nights with his geology study group, one of which had ended with him waking up on the locked balcony of a boathouse with no idea how he’d got there. Him and Charlotte had gone on several binges during the seven months they’d spent together, and as far as he knew, she’d gone on to do the same with Dundy the year after that. Tom had grown out of it, but it still made him feel queasy whenever he came across groups of drunk students walking the streets of Cambridge early in the morning, or at Sainsbury’s late in the evenings, girls tottering on high heels who were dressed far too lightly for the season, or in their pyjamas and clutching bottles of wine at the till, boys wearing togas and formal gowns and juggling bags of greasy donuts and packs of beer.

They made him feel old. They made him feel like he’d gladly haul them out of town by the scruff of the neck so they might walk off their hangovers in the British countryside. (In those moments, he’d willfully forget that the hillwalking people used to do their fair share of drinking as well, with their boozy socials and the compulsory after-walk drinks).

The youthful drinking wasn’t so much a John Irving thing as it was a university-wide thing, a nationwide thing, and it was probably far more subdued in Cambridge than in other universities. Most of the students Tom knew bounced around as undergrads and eventually learned to limit the drinking in favour of equally unhealthy all-nighters ahead of essay deadlines and presentations. Trading in sleepless evenings spent partying for sleepless evenings spent studying and, finally, for a more sustainable balance of the two: a university graduate’s turning point into adulthood. 

And it would have been wrong to say that John only became animated when he was drunk. 

Near the end of his second year, Tom had attended the annual May Bumps race with a mixed group of hillwalking people and classmates and college mates, and John’s boat had successfully bumped the boat ahead of it and they’d seen them go past, Cornelius sitting at the stern and then John and Edward and Graham and the others, with twigs and leaves in their hair to celebrate the bump, and for once John was laughing at Cornelius’ jokes, properly laughing, his face relaxed and open, and Tom had had a passing thought of, “Maybe he isn’t who I thought he was - maybe I don’t know this guy at all.”

14.

Johnny wants to hear about John, as if the story could be extricated from the rest of Tom’s life and still make sense. Tom knows better than to try to convince Johnny that he’s in the wrong about anything, but he’s definitely wrong about this.

It was never a cohesive narrative - if anything, it’s several narratives instead of a single one, where events that might seem unrelated to John eventually tie back to him, and where the narrative that Johnny thinks that he wants to hear, the one where Tom meets John, and comes to know him, and begins to want him until it becomes a truth that can’t be denied - this narrative isn’t a clear-cut thing. It didn’t happen, or it didn’t happen in that order, or it happened with other events and people happening alongside it, bisecting it, and it troubles Tom’s continuous search for honesty and scientific accuracy that he can’t provide understandable schematics that would make sense of it all. 

It’s several narratives instead of a single one, and one of those narratives is about the Arctic, and Crozier and Blanky, and Edward Little.

Once Tom had decided that he wanted to become a glaciologist, he was informally introduced to what he’d often heard Cornelius call the Polar Club. The Polar Club was a group of researchers, some of them professors and doctors and fellows, others doctoral candidates and Masters students and undergraduates, all of them working on subjects related in some way or other to the poles, all of them familiar in some way or other with Francis Crozier. Crozier’s work was a calling card where his behaviour wasn’t: two decades spent studying the populations that lived beyond the Arctic circle, with a particular focus on Inuit culture. Beyond that and on a daily basis, Crozier had a reputation for being short-tempered and obstinate, for drinking too much and too often, for refusing to play by the rules when it came to symposiums and publications and the day to day life of the college, the social appearances and niceties that were expected of a fellow whose college was giving him room and board.

Most of the stories about Crozier Tom had heard second-hand, and Crozier never gave him grounds to believe them. After the bicycle episode, Blanky and Crozier all but took him on - signing him up for symposiums as early as his second year, when he was still a blustering undergraduate, inviting him to study sessions in Crozier’s office where he met and interacted with other polar specialists, taking him along to have tea or dinner on week-ends when he couldn’t afford to go home. Blanky’s wife Esther once took him on a memorable trip to London, for an afternoon tea and then an evening at the theatre, and throughout it all, that day in London and every other act of kindness or professional encouragement, Tom said thank you and fought the voice at the back of his mind that whispered that he didn’t deserve this. It wasn’t like he was a Dickensian orphan. He had a loving family, not much money but enough to live on, surely, and there was no reason why he should be more qualified to work in this field than anyone else. There was no reason why Crozier and Blanky should single him out as being worthy of help, and trust, and affection.

He worked harder, desperate to prove to them that their faith hadn’t been misplaced, and it took years, but there eventually came a day when he slowed down enough to look around himself - that must have been in France, he was having coffee and there were core drills stacked upon racks on the walls like the blades used to be stacked in the boathouses in Cambridge - and he realised that he was no longer a dreamer with ambitions above his means. Somewhere along the way, he’d become a scientist.

The year before he went to France, he took part in his first expedition. He’d just completed an MPhil in Polar Studies. Part of the Polar Club, Crozier included, was set to spend most of the summer in Canada, travelling northwards as the members of the expedition collected data for their respective projects. The expedition went nothing as planned. Crozier was called away at the last minute to deal with Cornelius, who’d launched a public attack of his work, and though Crozier’s students proceeded with their journey, they had to do so with limited funding and no supervision whatsoever. The group dynamics imploded on the ice. 

Tom only ever discussed this nightmarish trip on a handful of occasions, including at the disciplinary hearings to which they were all subjected upon their return.

One of these discussions took place in the small waiting room of the hospital where Edward and him were waiting for news of their meteorologist, Henry Foster Collins, who’d got shot in the foot by microbiologist Charles Des Voeux. This incident had occurred at the end of several days of wandering across identical landscapes of tufted ice and pastel-coloured skies. Collins had been high at the time. Tom hadn’t been, but he also couldn’t tell for certain whether he’d really seen the shadow of a bear following them for hours on end, always shifting out of his direct line of sight, and by the time paranoia and exhaustion caught up with them, amidst Dundy’s authoritative swearing and Collins’ manic laughter and Des Voeux waving a rifle around and Edward standing exhausted in the middle of it all like he was thinking that a bullet might not be such a bad idea after all - Tom couldn’t have sworn that there was anything more level-headed about himself than there was about the others. He was merely better at hiding his feeling of mounting dread. 

“We’ve witnessed the break-down of civilisation,” Edward had said in the hospital, fingers slowly shredding a cigarette that he hadn’t smoked.

They’d spent five hours in a car with Henry bleeding in the backseat and then two days sharing a cabin once Henry had been evacuated, as they waited for the plane that would take them to join him. They’d hardly ever spoken to each other in Cambridge and after that ordeal, Tom knew they would either never speak to each other again, or remain close friends for life. He had an inkling it might turn out to be the latter.

“I think you might be the most civilised person I know,” Tom said. “Even on that last day, you were still… Getting dressed. Trying to get things done.”

“You too,” Edward pointed out.

“Yeah. But you still believed in it, and I was putting up a front.”

“Being civilised would have got me shot. At least you tried to get the gun off him.”

Edward reminded Tom of these explorers and mountaineers of old, those men who went to their deaths with gallantry, still clutching every last shred of whatever they thought constituted their Englishness. Flags, biscuits, a picture of their beloved wife. The Robert Falcon Scotts and the George Mallorys. Edward even looked the part, with his bright dark eyes and that straight nose, the unexplainable sadness lingering at the corners of his mouth. He believed in precision and order but spent his breaks reading French literature and smoking cheap cigarettes, and he owned a deck of cards where the pictures had been replaced with crude etchings inspired by Russian prison tattoos. 

Tom looked at Edward’s tired profile, at his tired fingers twisting the cigarette paper, and he thought of how quickly he’d dismissed Edward back in Cambridge. Over the years, he’d make many strange encounters in the field, on glaciers and mountains and in remote research stations, on boats small and large and on wobbly charter planes. People he’d befriend and people he’d sleep with and people he’d dislike intensely and be forced to spend months sharing a cabin with.

But Edward was the first of those fire-forged encounters, and for many reasons, he’d remain the most important one.

“What will you do next?” Tom had asked.

“Proceed as planned, as soon as we’re sure Henry is going to be alright. I was supposed to finish the summer studying in Murmansk. And you?”

“Remember that American team of geoscientists we met in Iqaluit? I thought I could try to see if they’d take me on for a few weeks. I could stay with Harry, if he’s still there.”

Their marine biologist had had the rather timely idea to ditch their group the moment they got to Canada. It was a love story, in the sense that Harry had met another bright young marine biologist with whom he intended to pursue a research project about a species of local fish. They’d all made fun of Harry at the time, but the fact was that Silna and him did eventually get funding for their program, after which they got married and created their own lab.

“And you’ll be in France next year, right?” Edward said. “So I won’t see you again for a while. At one of Crozier’s shindigs, maybe. Well, Hartnell, it’s been a pleasure.”

Tom shook his hand, with a passing thought for John Irving, because that behaviour was very much like John, the solemnity of the last name and that handshake, and back in the day when John was still in Cambridge, as early as when Tom had run into them on their college grounds, John and Edward had been something of a package, two well-mannered, exhaustively cultured, well-dressed young men, dark-haired and pale, never further than a few feet from one another.

Edward eventually caught his plane for Russia. In his wake he left a few books and that pack of cards with its crude pictures of angry cats and crowned skulls and onion-shaped domes and a pair of large, sultry eyes.

 _A pair of eyes tattooed on your chest could mean that you were keeping an eye on the other inmates,_ Edward had told him, handing him the card as they sat in the waiting room. _A pair of eyes on the stomach, however, would have marked you as a homosexual. If you’d been an inmate in a Soviet prison, that is._

Tom hadn’t dated anyone since Charlotte. While he’d been feeling more and more confident that he’d pursued the right career path, he wasn’t so sure that he’d been pursuing the right people. 

Something must have shown on his face, because Edward had cracked a rare smile.

 _This isn’t Soviet Russia,_ he’d said, reaching out to give Tom’s shoulder a brief squeeze. _Don’t worry. You’re not alone. You’ll be fine._

Tom had told the story of that trip to Johnny before he even got back, over the phone, in fragments as the signal cut them off every two or three minutes: how Henry had got shot in the leg, how they’d had to pull him out of a freezing river, how he’d spent hours talking to Edward in the car so Edward wouldn’t fall asleep at the wheel, the two of them hoping they were headed in the right direction, that the clinic on the map would turn out to actually exist. Later, he also told Johnny about the disciplinary hearings and how everyone in the expedition had got away scot-free. 

But that part he’d left out: coming to terms with an idea that had been lurking at the edges of his mind, like the bear he’d thought he’d seen during the expedition, a massive shape that hovered and threatened and refused to ever step into the open. Dragging that idea out, facing it in the cold light of day, putting together the way he’d been looking at the men’s hands as they dealt the cards - Dundy’s long hands, thoroughly lined, the flicker of Edward’s nervous fingers, Henry’s making a fist around the pack from which he pulled out one card at a time, throwing them down in front of each player, a flash of teeth as Des Voeux bit at his nails - reconciling those lingering looks with half-remembered dreams, of hands clutching at his hair, slipping inside the many layers of his polar clothing - reconciling the looks and the dreams with that pair of eyes on the card.

When he did tell Johnny, a year after maybe, once he’d started seeing Max, it had become a state of affairs. _I’m gay, actually._ Something unquestionable. Insofar as this particular narrative had a starting point, however, this starting point was Edward Little giving him two books in a language he couldn’t read, and a pack of cards, in a language he thought he was finally starting to understand.

15.

“John wrote to me after I’d come back from Iqaluit. He’d heard about the expedition - not much, because Edward didn’t really talk about it, but between Edward and the others, he must have got the bare bones of it.”

The message contained such Irvinguisms as _exemplary behaviour_ and _I never had any doubts that you were an upstanding fellow_ and the more genuine, more surprising, _Thank you for being there for Little. If I can ever be of any help to you, at any point in time, please don’t hesitate to reach out._

Tom had replied with a picture of the tall barrier of mountains above Grenoble.

 _You’re missing out on some good walks,_ he’d written.

 _It would seem that I am, indeed,_ Irving had replied.

“After that we kept talking, and that winter we went skiing together…”

“Hm, okay. That’s a leap,” Johnny remarks. “Did you invite him? Did he invite himself? No offense, Tommy, but you’re not the best storyteller. It feels like I spent hours waiting to hear if you’d stolen a bicycle, which in the end, you didn’t steal, and now we’re going straight from nothing to romantic ski trips…”

“Oh, shut up,” Tom mutters, though as often when Johnny is pulling his leg, it’s hard to keep the smile from his face. “I’m saving you… the story of a lot of boring text messages. Nice snow today! Look at that enormous ice core! I might try to get up this or that mountain...”

“ _Look at that enormous ice core?_ ” Johnny repeats, smile widening even as a flush spreads across Tom’s face.

“You’re the absolute worst. How is there even anything suggestive about that? I knew he was straight. I’d just met Max. We were friends… Or we became friends. Around then, around the time I was in France. We went skiing a few times, with Max and other people from my lab. And John came back in the summer so we could hike in the Chartreuse range. Graham Gore came along. You’ve met Graham, he was there when we went to that pub for my birthday, when was that, two years ago? He’s a lawyer.”

“Ah. The rich but otherwise nice guy who spent the evening paying for all of our drinks.”

Tom had got along well with Graham in Cambridge. Though he was part of John and Edward’s circle, that group of former public school boys who stood to one day make a lot of money, Graham was so genial and outgoing that it was difficult not to like him. It remains difficult now, even though his job is the antithesis of Tom’s. As a corporate lawyer, Graham has made himself a name defending the interests of several large oil companies. They have been talking less of late. Graham’s specialty, what made him so likable in the first place, is that he knows how to defuse fights. When it comes to climate change however, and patient as Tom may be, and has been, he is no longer interested in being talked down with clever turns of phrase and a friendly pat on the arm, a call for “Another pint for my friend Tom here, who’s had a long day.”

“Whenever we went on one of those trips, it felt a bit like I’d reassembled the hillwalking club,” he says. “Except with more French people. Things were going well, so I decided to stay another year, and the lab that was hosting me had that research trip planned in Antarctica, so I went along. I didn’t get to speak to John much around that time, because after Antarctica there was those ten months I spent on a boat off the coast of Greenland...”

16.

When John arrived in Grenoble for the first time, Tom hadn’t seen him in more than two years. John didn’t do social media, but Tom had found a few pictures of him online, enough to ascertain that he hadn’t changed much. Same dark brown hair, now complemented with a short beard, and on every picture, that same direct gaze that told you that this was a man who knew right from wrong and would not hesitate to let you know that you’d let him down. Some of it was armour, but it took Tom several more years to figure that out. 

Waiting for John in the cafe where they’d agreed to meet, he’d wondered who would show up: John the former Cambridge student turned financial analyst, or the quieter version from the hillwalking club. And the answer had been, a mix of both worlds: John in a stern woollen coat over a purple fleece and jeans and hiking boots, backpack and skis slung over his shoulder, hair mussed up by a sober black beanie that he’d thrown down on the table upon arrival, along with his wallet and the keys to his rental.

“Hartnell!” he’d said with a smile. “It feels like it’s been ages. Tell me everything; how’s the ice, how’s the boyfriend?”

It had seemed prudent to mention Max, seeing as the three of them would be skiing together, and the last thing Tom wanted to do was to create a situation where Max would feel like Tom had been hiding their relationship. Yet he’d felt slightly uncomfortable bringing it up on the phone ahead of John’s visit. Max and him had only been going out for two weeks, though they’d been working together for months. And while Tom had tried to forget about Cornelius’ comments regarding John’s supposed homophobia, they kept lurking at the back of his mind. When he’d told John about Max, however, there’d only been a second of surprised silence before John had said, rather warmly, _Congratulations! Can’t wait to meet the guy. If he’s half as good a person and walks half as well as you do, he’s bound to be a keeper._

Tom had told him off for his exaggerations - it often felt like making it out of that Arctic trip alive had erected him into a paragon of virtue in John’s mind, for some reason - but he’d been relieved.

When the waiter came over, John ordered sparkling water. For most of that holiday and the ones that followed, until Tom left Grenoble, he never saw him drink anything but water and the occasional fruit juice.

They talked about Tom’s work at the lab, how the scientists in Grenoble had been extracting samples for decades, how the bubbles of air in the ice could provide information about changes in the atmosphere since the ice had been formed, thus alerting scientists to changes both natural and man-made. The aim, ultimately, Tom had explained, was to give accurate predictions regarding climate change, and also to chart the current evolution of the ice, here and in the rest of the world.

John was a patient audience. When Tom tried to steer the conversation back to him, he waved the opportunity away, took another sip of his sparkling water and asked a few more pointed questions about the core drilling process, and how far down could they go, and how old was the oldest ice they’d ever brought back? 

Hundreds of thousands of years, Tom had said, but good samples were hard to get by, because the ice had a tendency to fold in on itself in layers and getting your hands on a continuous sample was more difficult than it may sound, even with good drills.

Distantly, he’d been aware that he’d changed since John had seen him last. He must have come across as more self-assured, more secure in his knowledge of the ice and of what his job might mean, on a personal level and to the world at large. And he’d grown, too, perhaps not in height but in every other way: he looked less like the lanky teen from the club, with his two distinct settings of “quiet daydreams” and “eager to get things done”, with his fair skin and his fair hair and his brother’s hand-me-down clothes and hiking gear. He’d let his hair grow out a bit, his skin had acquired some colour in the sun. His clothes were his own. He’d wondered what kind of an impression he was making on John, because after all, and as much as he’d been reluctant to admit it back then, John had made an impression on him in Cambridge.

John was making an impression on him now, with his seemingly bottomless interest in whatever it was that Tom was up to, be it glaciology or Max or Alpine skiing, and his visible excitement at the idea of spending a week-end hurtling down the slopes. Tom had never thought about it until then, but it hit him square in the face during that reunion, the fact that John had blue-grey eyes and freckles and a full mouth, the fact that he had the sort of good looks that crept up on you until it was too late and you could do little but admit that yes, of course, if given the chance, you wouldn’t say no to finding out what kissing him felt like.

It hadn’t worried him at the time. Since he’d started to look at men, really look at them rather than focusing on their clothes and their jobs and whatever question they were putting to him, this sort of thing had started to happen more and more often, as if his brain or perhaps his body were catching up on years of not letting himself pay attention. It was made all the more meaningless by the fact that Tom had little to no interest in passing flings, and with Max, it seemed like he’d found someone with whom he could build something real.

He’d even shared some of that with John that day at the café: that what he looked for in relationships was stability, nothing like being carried away, no fireworks or dramatic gestures or grand declarations of love.

“Just someone I can be with,” he’d said.

“Sound thinking,” John had agreed.

Tom can’t look back on those days and not feel a pang of affection for that innocent version of himself. How could he have known? And besides, if it were possible to go back, he’d probably do it all the exact same way, and he’d enjoy that prolonged period of calm for as long as he could, knowing of the turmoil that would follow.

17.

Lunch is a forlorn slice of pâté en croûte and two leaves of a shriveled salad, mash and some sort of unidentified white meat and a yoghurt and apple compote. Tom doesn’t mind the lack of taste, but he doubts that this kind of meal will help him regain the body weight he lost during the ordeal. 

It’s difficult not to feel trapped. While he isn’t one to complain, he’s also never been good at staying put. Beside him, Johnny is eating an enormous sandwich, salami and pickles. In the evening his well-fed and forever ridiculously energetic brother will go for a run with the setting sun, as he apparently did the night before. It’s only been four days but Tom longs for a walk. Not anything special; no mountains need be involved. He’ll take the length of the hospital corridor. A trip to the bathroom in the corner of his room.

Once they’ve cleared the empty tray he dozes off for a while, not long enough or well enough to dream. Then it’s a new battery of tests, and by the time the doctor leaves again, there’s a visitor at the door.

“Tom,” the man says, ruddy face breaking into a sly grin. “Do you remember me?”

His accent is atrocious; this alone would have given him away.

“Professeur Charrière.”

Immediately Tom tries to straighten up against his pillow, as if Crozier had stepped through the door. There’s little in common between the two men save a wild and thoroughly contained energy that they seem able to disperse at will, enveloping whomever is in need of their support. 

“My brother Johnny,” Tom says. “Johnny, the professeur was my supervisor in Grenoble. He’s a well-known scientist, and an excellent mountaineer.”

Charrière shakes Johnny’s hand and refuses a chair, choosing instead to go lean against the window, hands in the pockets of his dark green jacket. In the ten years since Tom first met him, he’s hardly changed at all. The lines on his face are more pronounced, maybe, but it’s still the same black eyes, that smile like a dent in a piece of cracked brown wood.

“I called the lab when I first found out I’d be coming to town,” Tom tells him. “They said you’d be in Paris, and then I didn’t see you at the conference, so I thought…”

“You thought you would go climb that mountain alone,” Charrière finishes, black brows drawn together.

“I thought I wouldn’t get to say hello,” Tom corrects him. “I wouldn’t have bothered you for a hike. I really didn’t mean to make such a fuss.”

“You’re lucky Thomas called us. You would still be up there.”

“Thomas?”

“Blanky,” Johnny pipes up from where he’s pretending to be immersed in his pile of essays. “Blanky called the lab here and they’re the ones who found you.”

“And you didn’t think to tell me?,” Tom says in a sharp aside. “Professeur, I don’t know how to…”

“You’re alive, and that’s the important thing,” Charrière declares. “When we found you, you looked like you were…” He mimes the gesture until Johnny whispers, “sleepwalking”. “Yes, sleepwalking. You just said two words. Crevasse, and water. We carried you the rest of the way. There was reason to think your feet were hurt.”

“The doctors are optimistic,” Johnny says.

“Good. I will tell Max.”

“Max,” Tom repeats, voice little more than a sliver.

“Max came with me, on the mountain. Max and Astrid. They couldn’t come today. Work at the lab. But they will be happy to know that you are feeling better.”

The last time Tom had seen the professor’s daughter, Astrid had just finished her medical studies. She had also been very pregnant. The idea that his old professor had set off on a glacier at night with a young mother and Tom’s ex-boyfriend in the vague hope that they’d find him alive isn’t a very comforting thought. The guilt garbles the words in his throat.

“We knew what we were doing,” the professor says, correctly interpreting his bereaved expression. “Things like this happen, and they’ll continue to happen if you continue to climb. And you will continue to climb. End of story. Your brother will walk me to my car, I want to talk to him.”

Johnny mouths “Me?”, rather perplexed, but he sets down his essays obediently and follows. At the door, Charrière turns around.

“I read the article you wrote with Blanky, about the Alaskan samples. It was good work.”

Tom barely has the time to say “Thank you” before Charrière walks out. From his sympathetic grimace at least, it would seem that he knows Tom wasn’t thanking him for the compliment alone.

This swift appearance and disappearance brings to mind the few parties they’d had at the lab in the years he spent there, Charrière knocking back a glass of whatever was at hand and retreating to his office to “work”, though the one time Tom and Astrid had pursued him with a plate of food, they’d found him asleep at his desk, the speakers of his computer quietly playing Saint-Saëns’ _Danse macabre._

_A haunted man in a haunted room,_ Astrid had murmured in French, closing the door behind them. 

_Haunted by what?_ Tom had asked.

 _The ice, the end of the world. Like you and me. It’s the job that does it,_ she’d told him lightly, and she’d straightened the paper crown on his head and led him back to the classroom they were using as a dancefloor.

Tom picks up his phone, but the very act of looking at it makes his head hurt. Messages from his mother, asking if she can come up and whether him and Johnny are done with their “little talk”. Messages from Blanky and from Crozier, who is either bored at the airport, or excessively concerned about Tom’s health. Emails that he doesn’t have the energy to open just yet, from the American team of glaciologists with whom he’d gone to the conference, from his father, from Graham, from Edward’s boyfriend back in Cambridge. Nothing from Edward, who is currently in Russia and probably miles away from any sort of signal. Nothing from John.

First Tom dispatches a quick message to his mother, telling her to come up. Then he turns to Blanky’s curt, _NEWS?_

 _Thank you,_ he writes back. _You might have saved my life. You definitely saved my hands and probably my feet. It can’t have been easy to do that from the top of the world. I’m eternally grateful. Drinks when you return?_

By the time Sarah Hartnell comes in and begins to fuss over the state of Tom’s bed and his hair and his reddened hands, Blanky has sent in his answer.

_We do have wifi at the camp, it’s not the world’s end. I got a call from your friend Irving who was at a loss who to send after you. It was an international effort. Stories like this are very media friendly, you should write a book. Keep Francis updated on the state of your feet, I’ll be in the field for the next few weeks. Esther will probably call you later. I better find you in one piece when I come back, boy._

“I’m sorry,” Tom says, with a hint of annoyance at how every single little event, be it a text or a visit or a medical test, seems to drain the energy he thought he’d regained by having to lie prone in his bed. “I think I’m going to sleep some more.”

“Don’t be stupid,” his mother says, not unkindly.

The last thing he sees before he goes under is Sarah picking up Johnny’s sandwich wrapper and what looks like a cemetery of plastic coffee cups.

18.

His relationship with Max endured while he was in Antarctica, but Max let him go ahead of Tom’s year-long wander in and around Greenland. It was the way he’d put it at the time: _I’m letting you go._

They had talked it out, at a café in Grenoble, with most of Tom’s belongings in a rucksack at his feet because he was about to go home for the summer, and he knew he’d be moving out of his French flat at the end of it. Max had ordered them beers but neither of them had taken so much as a gulp.

The issue, Max had said, wasn’t that Tom’s job led him to travel too much. It was rather that when given the opportunity to try and travel with Max, who worked in the same field as him and could have tried to join the same projects, applying for the same grants, Tom had made the choice to apply alone. As if it didn’t mean anything that they might be separated for ten months; as if Tom hadn’t even wanted to consider that there might be an alternative.

“We’re still so young,” Tom had said. “We’re too young to stake our entire future on one another. We shouldn’t be making professional decisions based on each other.”

“I wasn’t asking you to stake your future on me,” Max had pointed out. “What I get from this is that you were afraid to spend a year on a boat with me.”

 _I’d be afraid to spend a year on a boat with anyone,_ Tom had thought. _If I tried to spend a year on a boat with my brother, we’d probably end up murdering each other, and that would be at the end of the first week._

Max had had a point regardless. He’d never intended to encourage Max to apply alongside him for the Greenland project, and he knew that if their positions had been reversed, Max would have wanted him to come along.

“Maybe if we’d met ten years from now,” Tom had said.

Max had laughed. “Ten years? Tom, in ten years, I expect to own a flat in town and a chalet in the mountains. What is it that you want?”

At the café, Tom hadn’t been able to answer. He’d been awkward and uncommonly sullen, reluctant to meet Max’s gaze. Max had brown eyes that could seem orange in the right light, fiery eyes, and the personality to match, kindling in need of the barest spark to become a forest fire. Tom had been drawn in by the warmth of those eyes, by Max’s wild bursts of enthusiasm, his ability to not give a damn about what anyone thought. Max would sing at the top of his voice in the moraines and on the glaciers as he waited for whomever was roped ahead of him to finally get a move on. He’d tackle Tom during lunch break high on the ice and hold him in a chokehold until the breath had gone from the both of them and there was little left to do but to collapse against the slope, which seemed to rise obligingly to meet their backs, and they’d watch the mountain become alive again as their eyes swept downwards, glaciers giving way to moraines giving way to alpine pastures and forests and finally, nestled in the flat heart of the valley, towns that began to glitter as the sun went down, a gathering of shadows between the houses, lightbulbs flickering on. 

Tom had liked it, had liked the bright and joyful companionship, the traditions of the lab, the monthly outings to hike or ski, the dinners so hearty he’d felt ready to roll under the table by the time punctilious waiters brought out the vast cheeseboard, which generally came after one or two dishes that had also involved a copious amount of cheese. He’d liked Grenoble, sunken in its valley, and the mountains around it, the luxury of stepping out of his flat and onto their foothills. He’d liked the irascible Charrière with his wild mountain stories, some of them believable (the time he’d single-handedly rescued three Swiss climbers from the Aiguille Verte) and others less so (tales of ghosts he’d met in the fog, of the man he’d once encountered at the train station in Saint-Gervais whom he knew without a doubt was also the wolf who’d been terrorising the neighbouring flocks). He’d liked the work and the team and of course Max, who embodied all that he would miss about this golden age.

It was what made it hard to explain, that it had been good because it wouldn’t last, that he’d arrived there knowing he would leave - for foreign glaciers, of course, but also, eventually, to go back home. Much as he’d enjoyed Grenoble, he couldn’t conceive of spending his life there. And as for the life he’d made there for himself, he couldn’t just pack it in a suitcase and take it along with him to wherever he went next.

It felt like he’d deceived Max, somehow, though the conclusion he eventually came to, much later than that, was that he’d been deceiving himself from the start.

“We could try to stay in touch while I’m away,” he’d said. “It won’t be impossible. We did manage to talk when I was in Antarctica.”

“I’m letting you go,” Max had said. To his credit, he didn’t sound angry and only faintly frustrated. There was even a note of amusement there - Max was the sort to see the humour in every situation, dark as it may be. “I’m doing you a favour. Then you can find someone from whom you can’t bear to be separated. Someone you’ll want to pack in your suitcase to Greenland, even if he’s not a glaciologist.”

“That’s not what I’m looking for,” Tom had said gently. “Maybe that’s the issue. Maybe I need… To keep the two separate.”

“You might think that now, but you’re not the sailor type.”

“The sailor type?”

“The sailor type, the mountaineering type,” Max said. “The kind that leaves their wife behind, in the harbour or in the valley. That’s not you. You’d be the kind to hang up your coat and your crampons if the right person asked you to. You just haven’t met the right person yet. And I hope you will, or it’s going to be a very lonely life on the ice.”

They had not exactly parted as friends. For all that Max had put on a brave face, Tom had heard later that he’d been, in Astrid’s words, “complètement à côté de ses pompes” - properly out of it, for weeks, moods changing like the weather, from melancholy mists to manic sunshine, and they only started speaking again some three years later, after they’d run into each other at a conference in Oslo. By that point, Max had begun to build the chalet he’d been dreaming of, and he intended to move into it with a science teacher he’d met while wall climbing.

He asked Tom how his year in Greenland had gone.

“Good”, Tom said, elaborating about the treks his team had made up various glaciers, surveying and collecting samples, studying the movement of the ice; he didn’t say a word about Sasha, the mate on the boat that had taken them to the glaciers. During the expedition, it had seemed prudent not to act on their attraction to each other, and once the expedition was over, with time on their hands but without the pull of the impossible landscapes and the swaying deck beneath their feet, somehow there’d been nothing left, and Tom had fled, mortified, confused that he’d ever thought he might want to go to bed with the man when Sasha’s laughter, and his heavy gait, and that way he had of drawing your attention with a snap of his imperious fingers, were now thoroughly getting on his nerves. Back in the city, they became a pair of blundering albatross, knocking elbows and speaking in tongues.

In Oslo Max asked, “Have you met someone?”, with palpable curiosity.

“Not really,” Tom said, which wasn’t exactly a lie.

He spent that conference counting down the days until he returned from Oslo to London. For various reasons, Max was the last person to whom he’d have confessed that impatience. 

Max, who’d told him life would one day catch up with him and that it’d feel like the ground was dropping out from under his feet.

Max who’d met John on several occasions, and who’d once said, with his usual tone of gentle mockery, “I pity the women who fall for him - it must happen quite often, right? Eyes like that. Eyes like a storm. Like falling in love with a saint or a statue or a painting. One of those old Spanish paintings where it’s only a monk in dark clothes against a dark background. It must be torture, to love a man like that.”

19.

“How are you doing? Head, face, ribs, fingers, toes?”

Tom’s noncommittal grunt prompts Johnny to fetch him a glass of water.

“They…” Tom clears his throat, swearing softly at the sharp pull on his ribs. “They cut open my boots, when I came in. For some reason I don’t... I don’t really remember Max or the others helping me down and getting me here. But I remember how they had to cut open my boots. Those boots had been places.”

“We’ll get you new ones,” Johnny says, with the patient, conciliatory tone that one might use on a very distraught child. “You’ll get to keep your feet, and that’s what matters.”

“What time is it?”

“Half past two. Your French professor took mum on a tour of the city. Or something like that. They went to get our things from the hotel, he’s decided we are staying at his house.”

“I assume mum refused.”

Judging by Johnny’s smile, Tom missed out on a riveting confrontation.

“He insisted. So now we’re all set for the next few days - eventually she’ll have to go home, make sure dad’s feeding himself properly, but in the meantime it might keep her from driving you mad. Therefore we have…” He makes a show of glancing down at his phone. “Four… No, three. My phone’s still set on the UK timezone. Three hours until they kick me out. Let’s get cracking. Where were we?”

“2012?” Tom ventures, looking down at his hands. Experimentally, he tries to flex his fingers, and finds them responsive, albeit a little cramped. His right hand hasn’t forgotten its three-hour-long grip on an ice-axe. “When I came back from Greenland. I’d been awarded that Gates scholarship, so it became clear that I was actually going to do my PhD. I was supposed to stay put in Cambridge for most of the first year, but I’d got used to being on the move and after Greenland the town seemed small and…”

 _Too warm_ , he thinks. Or maybe, _Not cold enough._ But how to express this without sounding like he’d thoroughly lost it? In recent years he’s learned to delineate the ways in which his journeys and his work have changed him, the better to be able to tell what he can share with people and what he’s better off keeping to himself. _I miss the cold_ is one of those things. _I miss being away from the intricacies of human society_ is another.

“... and soon after I was back in Cambridge, I started to head out on the week-ends. Sometimes with the hillwalking club, sometimes with friends from uni… We’d go on long cycling trips in the countryside. I also went home a few times, I think that was around the time you and Maya started dating? And I went on walks with John, but it was different from the hikes and ski trips that we'd done in France. I think we went to Yorkshire…”

“Different how?” Johnny interjects.

“John had just changed jobs. Maybe his new job was less stressful. I don’t know. He was less cautious. He’d stopped functioning on autopilot. Whatever it was, he was getting something out of those walks, and whenever we came back we’d already be planning the next one. We’d unfold our maps on picnic tables and we’d try to think of the most challenging approach to a walk or a summit... It gave us some kind of rush. We weren’t the sort of people to make rash decisions, but we both liked to push ourselves, and maybe there was an element of, How far can we take this?”

The main difference between the walks they’d taken in France and every single outing they did in the UK that autumn is one that Tom doesn’t point out.

In France, they’d always headed out as a group - with Max, with the rest of the lab, with Graham.

The first time Tom had sought John out that autumn, he hadn’t offered to invite other people along, and John hadn’t commented on it. By the time they set off for the second and then the third time, it’d become an accepted rule that these trips need not involve anyone else but the two of them.

20.

Being alone with John meant, first of all, that they stopped calling each other by their last names. It meant long conversations where the subject mattered less than the distraction from a monotonous stretch of road; long silences that Tom began to mind less and less, following John’s easy stride up a hillside, their breathing evenly matched to accommodate the strain; shared lunches and dinners, where it emerged during the first walk that John cooked elaborately and that Tom was rather an adept of throwing sandwiches together last minute, after which John began to bring extra portions of his salads of soy beans and celery and lentils and Tom provided an equally-nutritious portion of bread and meat or cheese that he never tired of seeing John digging into; shared accommodation in hostels where they’d leave their muddy boots at the door, John sitting cross-legged on a bench with an enamel mug between his hands as Tom dealt the cards ( _“That looks like Little’s deck” - “It is.”_ ), long drives along grey motorways, Tom dozing off in the passenger’s seat, long legs awkwardly crammed under the dashboard, using John’s tartan scarf as a pillow.

Tom had never been a very introspective person. It was enough that he enjoyed this and that John seemed to enjoy it too, though it did amuse him sometimes, to consider how they might have ended up there, the two of them alone of all the people he’d walked with over the years, and there were many ways in which he could have explained it, _It’s the way life goes, close friends drifting away and people you never thought you’d like sticking with you,_ and _He walked well, he was a good climber, and out there it’s all that matters, not whether you get along but whether the other person can hold their own in a tough spot,_ and _I can’t say I really know what his life was like at the time, he didn’t like to talk about himself, but I could see he needed those breaks from the city and what I knew was a demanding job in the sort of high-rise where the walls are either glass or the kind of dull office palette that turns your soul into a laser printer, I liked to see it all fall away the further we got, until he began to bicker with me over directions and to sulk because the coffee wasn’t to his taste, and he’d slap his hands on the table if I beat him at cards and when they put us in that tiny room in Yorkshire with the bunk beds and the window overlooking the dustbins he caught the kind of laughing fit that left him wheezing for breath._

And when John did find his breath again it was to say, _If the point is to sleep on top of each other, we might as well just pack a tent next time._

John realised his own double entendre a second too late. There might have still been a way for him to go on talking, pretending that nothing was amiss, but instead he lapsed into a confused silence, cheeks tinged a bright pink, and Tom gave him that indulgent look meant to hide how much John’s straight panic hurt him, and that was that.

There remained one key feature of these outings that Tom had neglected to mention to Johnny. John no longer carried his watercolours around, but he kept a pen and a notebook at hand and he’d use those to scribble feathered, rustling landscapes of shifting heather and ferns, shadow-streaked hills, and once, after John had told him to _Sit still and look thoughtful,_ he added in Tom’s almost featureless profile - hyphen of an eye, curled comma of a mouth, his grey jumper fading into the fine, criss-crossing lines of a grey sky.

Tom looked at the drawing. _We clamb the hill tegither,_ it said; John always captioned his sketches, with quotes and lines from poems or hymns that Tom couldn’t always place. Something about the softness of the lines caused him to reach out and touch the back of John’s arm through the fleece jacket. John’s movement of avoidance was discreet but unmistakable. A step sideways, his arm falling away.

“John liked to sketch, sometimes, and he’d give strange titles to the sketches,” Tom says, and leaves it at that.

21.

“That year there was a party at Graham’s for the New Year. 2013. He used to own a flat in Hampstead Village, at the time he was working for a political think tank. It didn’t last long, but for a while he had... ideas. It was all about making a difference and making the world a better place. The sad thing is, I’m sure he meant it... Graham and John would throw bashes in London and invite their friends who were still in Cambridge, which at one point included me. I made the trip with Edward a few times. It was a lot of their posh friends staring down at their crystal glasses in private clubs, and when I did go I felt horribly out of place. London townhouses with green and white stucco on the walls and stairs that gave you this impression of space even though they were crammed inside tiny corridors. Skylights in the roof. At those parties I was a curiosity, I didn’t exactly blend in with the rich financers who’d climbed Mount Everest, or the occasional lord who ‘dabbled’ in polar exploration…”

“If this is going to be another long digression about the necessity for rich people to change their ways before the sea levels rise by another two inches, maybe we can save it for another time.”

“I was getting somewhere,” Tom protests.

22.

Graham’s party was a costumed party. This wasn’t the reason why Tom decided to go - it’d been a combination of wanting to hang out with people who weren’t his colleagues for an evening, of having just spent two weeks back home in sleepy little Gillingham, and of Edward begging him to come along. _I’m not good at parties,_ he’d said, and Tom, who’d recently attended a party at James Fitzjames’ and witnessed Edward spend three consecutive hours reading _The Idiot_ in an armchair by the fire while the party was in full swing around him, had replied, _I believe you._

Tom had rented a lion onesie complete with a yellow felt mane. Edward was wearing his usual get up of a dark jumper and jeans with the addition of a paper crown. When Tom caved in and asked if he’d recycled the thing from a Christmas cracker, Edward answered in all seriousness that his costume was meant to depict “an avant-garde setting of a Shakespeare play. A modern staging of Richard II, or something of the sort”.

Tom wouldn’t be able to tell Graham’s house from its neighbours if he walked past it again. It was Victorian like every other house in the street was Victorian, with a brick front and sash windows and a columned porch. As he took in the quiet, elegant little street, he’d asked, half-jokingly, “So, how much would it cost me to buy a flat in this area?”, and Edward, looking sheepish, as often when the discrepancy between their financial circumstances came to light, had answered, “Somewhere upwards of a million pounds, I should think.”

Edward and John’s families were well-off. Graham’s was rather at the “disgustingly rich” end of the spectrum, a fact that he tried to compensate for by being generous at all times, while staying respectful of his friends’ boundaries and pride. Regardless of where they took place, Graham’s parties often assembled a crowd of people he’d met at school and at Cambridge, as well as his old boat crew and his law school peers, various artists and scientists desperate for patronage mingling with the wealthy children of conservatives and the equally wealthy, self-proclaimed liberal bohemians and nature-lovers from his neighbourhood, with a few chance encounters thrown in, all of which made for a stimulating but at times explosive cocktail. Overall, Tom must have attended five or six of these gatherings, and each time he’d felt like he was taking part in an anthropology expedition, watching cheques and business cards changing hands, affairs coalescing or disintegrating by the light of a delicate lampshade, a champagne glass being flung at a judge’s head, vacuous conversations taking place in front of paintings and sculptures that could probably have been exhibited in museums, and it wasn’t rare for him to call it quits after an hour or two, in favour of retreating to a pub with whomever was willing - there were often quite a few other stranded souls in attendance.

That night he lost track of Edward soon after they’d arrived, having detoured by the brightly-lit kitchen to deposit their offering of two bottles of wine - although Edward had chosen the bottles, Tom had insisted on paying his share - but the flat was full of people eager to talk and drink and drink and talk, and his costume turned out to be a good conversation opener. At some point he ran into Dundy, who’d made more of an effort than Edward, with a golden crown and a medieval-looking tunic and an incongruous pistol that he must have borrowed from James’ extensive collection.

“How’s the PhD?” Dundy asked, handing him a glass of wine.

“It’s good,” Tom answered. “It’s terrifying.”

“You’ll be fine, you have the stomach for it,” Dundy said, giving his shoulder a pat.

This might have been Dundy’s way of alluding to the Arctic expedition, and the two very different ways they’d gone about handling it, Dundy grim and angry and determined to threaten the others into submission, Tom quietly clinging to his patience and hope in human nature, for better and for worse.

“Has either of you seen Fairholme? Little says he’s around here somewhere...”

Tom looked around at John and did a double take. He couldn’t have said why: the costume shouldn’t have been surprising, not thematically at any rate, and it was just like John to show up in a painstakingly homemade costume at a party where most people had either bought or rented theirs. 

“Fairholme? What is he dressed up as?” Dundy asked.

John’s shrug caused his halo of golden tinfoil to wobble slightly. 

“No clue. If you see him or Marlowe, let me know, I haven’t seen them in a while. Is the punch strong?”

“Disappointingly light,” Dundy answered, though his definition of “light” was likely to be very different from John’s.

“Good. I’ll see you later then,” John said, heading off towards the living-room.

“That man hasn’t changed at all in almost a decade,” Dundy commented. “Still as straight-laced as they come. Wasn’t it Charlotte who used to say he was made entirely of numbers and prayers?”

“I don’t think Charlotte knew him very well,” Tom shot back. When Dundy raised his eyebrows, he tried to elaborate, “He’s reserved, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be passionate, or that he doesn’t have a sense of humour.”

Dundy stared at him a moment longer before saying, “I stand corrected, then. I do wish I’d had the opportunity to see a passionate Irving, though. That must be one for the books.”

After that Tom made a beeline for the punchbowl, trying to shake the impression that Dundy’s eyes were following him across the room. With his glass of punch in hand, he sat for a while with another lion, a lawyer friend of Graham’s who’d just broken up with her boyfriend from uni and who needed a shoulder to cry on, and then had dinner with Edward and two of his friends, James and Lizzie, who turned out to be the people John had been looking for, though the volutes of John’s wings and his tinfoil halo were no longer anywhere in sight. Tom shared an ottoman with Edward as he ate from a china plate piled high with food he’d snagged rather haphazardly from the buffet. 

Graham intercepted him as he was making his way back to the kitchen, on a mission to get Lizzie a slice of some Viennese chocolate cake. At the start of the evening, Graham had been wearing a big furry white mask, in keeping with his big furry white costume, but he’d lost or discarded it since then. Tom hadn’t had the occasion to ask him what the costume was supposed to represent, a very shaggy dog or a polar bear or perhaps a yeti. 

Graham’s flimsy excuse of wanting to introduce Tom to a friend turned out to be a semi-successful matchmaking attempt, because the man Graham had had in mind was soft-spoken and kind and either genuinely interested in glaciology, or very good at playing pretend. Charles was a year younger than Tom and worked as a sound engineer in a number of theatres in London. They’d been talking for the better part of an hour by the time Tom excused himself to go to the bathroom. One of Graham’s artist friends, a woman with a green turban and bangles all the way up to her elbows, stopped him at the door.

“Someone’s being sick in there.”

She raised her hands in surrender when Tom opened the door anyways, bangles clinking against each other, and walked off with a whisper of, _Suit yourself._

“Are you… John?”

There was no mistaking the wings, cardboard painted silver and tied to his shoulders and chest with string. The halo he’d set aside on the nearby window sill. Upon hearing his name, he raised his head from the toilet bowl, his face stark white against the dark brown of his hair and beard. Tom could see the sole of a sneaker peeking out from under the hem of his shapeless brown tunic.

The room was as spacious as the rest of the flat, but Graham must have stripped it to its bare essentials ahead of the party, and it took Tom a minute to locate a glass inside one of the cabinets. He filled it with cold water and handed it over.

“Something you ate?”

“More like everything I drank,” John mumbled.

Tom snorted from inside the medicine cabinet.

“Here, take one of these,” he said, handing down a tablet of Ibuprofen. “Give me the glass, you need to drink some more.”

As he turned on the tap, he kept on talking, an old habit from high school, when he’d try to cheer up Johnny as he sat similarly dejected on the floor of the bathroom in Gillingham, after they’d ingested and Johnny had regurgitated whatever revolting concoction their friends had come up with, using a bottle of Sprite and the contents of their parents’ bar.

“This reminds me of my undergrad. I went to this party with Magnus - do you remember Magnus? Big guy, nice and a bit anxious.”

He didn’t say, _Everyone wondered how he’d got into Cambridge,_ even though that had been everyone’s prevalent reaction to Magnus, who was indeed very nice but who worked himself into a panic at the very thought of sitting down to write an essay. Tom had spent hours with him at the library on one or two occasions, trying to help him through coursework, attempts that had left the both of them feeling drained and dissatisfied. Cornelius had had better luck when he’d given it a go, using an elaborate and endlessly patient carrot and stick system where he rewarded Magnus with snacks and game breaks on his phone for every paragraph he managed to write or learn.

“Magnus,” John said. “Hickey’s friend.”

“Yeah.” Tom knelt on the cold tile and put the glass between John’s clammy hands. “He wasn’t a bad person. I think most of the people gravitating around Cornelius were misguided to a degree. But yeah, we went out to a club one night and Magnus was so drunk he couldn’t walk, so we borrowed a wheelbarrow from Magdalene College to wheel him home. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried pushing a wheelbarrow on irregular pavement, but the noise and just… the effort it took, we got so fed up we almost abandoned him halfway. We thought maybe he could just finish the night in the wheelbarrow, somewhere between Magdalene and his bedroom.”

“A scene out of a Brueghel painting.”

Tom took the casual reference to some artwork he didn’t know as a sign that John was doing better.

“Okay,” John murmured. “I won’t keep hogging the bathroom. Could you help me up, please?”

Tom took his extended hand and hauled him to his feet, quickly reaching for his shoulders when he stumbled.

“Atta boy.”

“You make a very majestic lion,” John informed him.

Until then Tom had almost forgotten about his costume. Now he wished he’d chosen something that didn’t make him look like such a massive idiot. A princely get-up like Dundy’s, maybe. John sounded sincere however, and he didn’t seem to mind having to lean on Tom’s yellow polyester sleeve.

“I think I’ll just head home.”

“Before midnight?”

“My pumpkin awaits,” John said dryly, letting go of Tom’s arm so he could go and splash water onto his ashen face.

“I’ll call you a cab.”

“I think I need some air. I’ll walk for a bit.”

“Don’t you live in…” Tom tried to remember, running through a list of all the fancy neighbourhoods he could think of. “... Shoreditch?”

“I can call a cab along the way if I need to. Do you know where Graham put our coats?”

“Yeah. I’ll go. I’m coming with you.”

“What?”

If Tom had been having second thoughts, John’s blue-eyed look of confusion would have decided him. He’d never felt such an urge to wrap someone in a blanket.

“Come on. Let’s get you home.”

In the living-room, Tom locked eyes with Charles as he walked past him. They hadn’t really progressed past pleasantries yet, and it would have been presumptuous to ask for his number, and rude to ask him to wait until he returned, when he had no idea how long he’d be gone. 

Not knowing what else to do, he merely nodded.

When he walked into the bedroom where Graham had taken everyone’s coats, he found a couple entangled on the window seat. They sprung apart when Tom turned on the light, the woman tugging down her skirt, the man readjusting his pants.

“I’ll only be a minute,” Tom told them.

The woman glowered at him as they stalked through the door.

When Tom had asked John to describe his coat, John had looked at him blearily and said, “It’s a black coat.” So Tom threw back his lion hood and began to rummage through the hangers, picking up and setting down a few black coats before he had the idea of checking the pockets as well as the labels. He knew he’d found the right one when his search turned up a pen and a small notebook. The last page John had drawn onto was filled with spruce, the tall trees crowned with leaves at the top but bare below. _As pants the hart for cooling streams,_ the title read, in John’s brisk cursive.

“Here you are,” Tom said, as he handed him the coat. 

John had been waiting for him in the deserted hallway, sitting at the foot of the stairs with his head in his arms. Though he no longer looked like he was about to throw up, he didn’t seem particularly perky either.

“I’m taking you away from something. You were…”

“I can come back later,” Tom cut him off. The wings were lying in a heap at John’s feet and he caught them by their strings and slung them over his shoulder. “I’ll call a cab when I’ve seen you home. Come on.”

It happened then, somewhere along Regent’s Canal on their way to Islington. John was striding ahead, the cold having quite visibly reinvigorated him, and following a few feet behind, his eyes on John’s slightly inebriated gait, the brown bag of his tunic flapping around his legs, Tom realised that he’d have walked with him anywhere that John wanted to go, be it up a mountain or across London in the middle of the night on New Year’s Eve.

His punch-drunk epiphany was two-fold, though the second part of it had little to do with walking, and was rather related to John’s look of gratitude in that bathroom and to the weight of his hand on Tom’s arm as he’d pulled himself to his feet. 

_(I wanted him to touch me. And I don’t mean that in a sexual manner…)_

_(Of course you do, you dirty-minded bastard...)_

_(... alright, shut your mug… I mean for a moment there he’d stopped keeping his distances, and I liked how that felt.)_

Ridiculous costumes aside, it wasn’t so different from their hikes, John going first and sometimes turning around to check that Tom was still behind him or to share some thought he’d had, a story that had come to his mind, _Would you believe that the last time I was here, I came across Hickey? I think he lives in Camden._ He still looked pale but he was smiling and that was familiar too, this openness that Tom had come to associate with the hills and the forests and the moors. 

Eventually, John decided he was hungry and they stopped at a kebab. The guy at the counter had obviously seen more outlandish things than a lion and a guy dressed like a monk ordering chips on New Year’s Eve - in fact he’d probably seen more outlandish things that very night, if the drunken crowds they’d encountered along the way were anything to go by, from the group of naked guys running along the canal waving plastic swords to the fully-dressed couple they’d seen taking a dive from one of the locks. Tom procured a fork and napkins and returned to find John eating with his hands as if he’d never once in his life given the impression of having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Tom watched him eat with the same unfettered fondness with which he’d stared at him all evening. 

When they started off again, he pulled the hood back over his head, mane and all, because the cold was slowly making its way past his alcohol-induced haze.

“That’s my stop,” John said, when they arrived, moments after they’d left it seemed, except they’d heard fireworks going off as they rounded the final corner.

John lived in a narrow brickhouse on a commercial street. It didn’t look like much from the outside, but Tom had no doubts the rent would have bled him dry in a month.

“Thank you,” John went on. “I’m sorry, for stealing you away like that. I hope there’ll still be a party when you get back. And that I won’t have ruined your chances with… whatshisname, the guy who works at the theatre.”

Tom smiled.

“John, if I’d wanted to spend the evening with Charles Best, I’d have stayed in Hampstead.”

“Really?” John’s smile was tired, thoughtful. Tom wasn’t sure he’d ever seen it before. “Would you like to…”

For a wildly incongruous moment, he thought that John was about to invite him in.

“Would you like to go skiing next year?” John said.

Tom looked away, at the empty road and the bright streetlamps and the group of revelers who were trying to exit the bar on the corner, holding on to each other’s shoulders and waists and, in the case of the one guy who’d fallen, to any leg within reach.

“This year, you mean? Happy new year.”

John’s voice was as unfairly gentle as his smile had been.

“Happy new year.”

“Let’s go skiing then,” Tom decided. “In a month or two. If you wanted… we could go back to where we went three years ago, when you visited me in France. The refuge that’s only open to scientists? I’m sure I could get the keys.”

“Yes. Alright, let’s do that. Let me…” John began to search the pockets of his coat. “I’ll pay for the cab.”

“I’ll manage. Go get some rest. Drink a litre of water before you go to bed. Here, don’t forget your wings.”

John swung them over his shoulder. Before Tom could step away, he grasped his arm and gave it a light squeeze.

“For what it’s worth, and selfish as it may sound, I’m glad this evening went the way it went,” he said.

( _Did you faint?_ Johnny asks, and ducks to avoid the gardening magazine that Tom has flung at his head.)

23.

Tom tells Johnny how he met up with John in the French town of Chambéry, how they drove to the much smaller village where they would start from, how neither of them had done this in years and he had to buy a new pair of skis. As Johnny peels an orange, dividing the slices between the two of them, Tom recounts the long approach to the refuge, the weather that was supposed to hold and then didn’t, the way the familiar mountains suddenly became unknown. He tries to explain what it looked like, the white mist that the wind sometimes tore apart, revealing slashes of landscape: looking up, a patch of grass, a scree slope, and blanket upon blanket of snow; looking down, a vertical slab of granite going down several hundred feet, the white expanse of a field, a shepherd’s cabin dead and black against a snowy field, against the colourless sky. He tries to express how it felt, with the wind against them, the finest hail nicking his cheeks, the weight of the skis on his back.

By the time they reached the high plateau where the refuge was situated, they were so tired and the snow flew in such heavy billows that they circled the refuge twice, each time coming upon their own tracks. It was only when John decided to venture eastwards that they found the building, after he’d slammed headfirst into the metal sheeting of the outer walls. Relief made them so giddy, relief and the lack of air perhaps, that their first reaction wasn’t to look for the door but to fall against each other, John swinging a weary arm around Tom’s neck, Tom letting his head fall on John’s shoulder, his gloved palm pressed flat against the wall in an attempt to hold the both of them up.

Tom spares Johnny no detail about the tedium of the climb and the bone-deep drag of that final hour, the way his fear had changed shape as it became clear that they were going in circles, from a distant warning bell to an all-encompassing dread that he refused to let show, continuing to put one foot in front of the other as if nothing were wrong, wondering if he should have had them turn back earlier when the snow began to fall, knowing it would have been madness considering how high up they already were. 

In some ways, it’s a diversion, though he wouldn’t readily admit to it. He tells Johnny everything about the climb so that he can gloss over the hours that followed, and he distracts him with the tale of a hike gone wrong so Johnny will ask focused questions, such as _Didn’t you have any lamps?_ (They were of no use in that fog) or, _Couldn’t you have set up a bivouac?_ (They could have, but they would have had to dig a hole and in that weather, it would have been a hellish experience.)

“We were dead tired when we got there. Best sleep I ever had.”

Which is certainly one way to put it. To call it the truth would be something of a stretch.

24.

As soon as they had shut the door on the snowstorm, Tom set down his backpack and started looking for the bag of kindling that he’d brought up from the valley. It took several tries before he could get a fire started in the little wood-burning stove. His hands had gone numb from the cold and the newspapers he’d found in the basket of logs by the stove were damper than he’d have liked. By the time he felt confident that the fire wouldn’t go out the moment he stepped away from it, John had lit some of the candle stubs stuck in bottles and cups around the room.

When Tom had seen the refuge for the first time, he’d thought it looked like a gas bottle, with its cylindrical shape and the metal covering its outer walls. On the inside, it had the look and smell of many refuges: comfortable and worn, maybe on the verge of becoming worn-out. The books and maps people had left behind on previous visits and the mismatched crockery didn’t hide the fact that for perhaps 340 days in the year, the place was abandoned. The pile of blankets set atop one of the bunks smelled musty. The place hadn’t changed at all since they’d last been there with Max. There wouldn’t have been much room for it to change. At the time, Max and Tom had slept in the top bunk and John down below, and looking at the dark sleeping area, the top bunk so close to the roof against which he’d knocked his head once or twice, Tom remembered how he’d laid there with Max’s head on his chest, his arm over Max’s shoulders, and he’d wondered, idly, his mind a moment away from sleep, if John always slept alone.

_It must be torture, to love a man like that._

“Tom?”

He turned away from the bunks to find John standing beside him with an expectant look. When he failed to answer whatever question had been put to him, John frowned at him and, to Tom’s surprise, he began to undo the buttons and zippers on Tom’s jacket. It was only then that Tom realised he was still wearing the clothes he’d been wearing outside, having never once stopped to remove them, while John had already discarded his jacket and fleece and put on a dry jumper.

Over time they’d perfected the winding down of their hikes, the changing out of wet clothes with their backs to each other and the unpacking of their bedding and fuel and food, John heating up soup while Tom boiled enough water to last them until morning, the shared meal sitting at one of the little tables with their knees touching, a map open on the table, John jotting down an account of the walk in his notebook while Tom read from the book he’d brought, and then the turning in early so they could start off before sunrise the next day.

Somehow, something had gone wrong this time around, though Tom wasn’t sure what it had been. Exhaustion? The plodding nightmare of their circles around the refuge? Unless he’d gone off-book before that, months ago, during that long walk on New Year’s Eve.

“John, I can…”

“Let me,” John said, in a voice that brooked no argument.

While Tom finished shrugging off his jacket and scarf, John knelt down to get started on his shoes.

Tom wasn’t feeling so washed out that he didn’t experience an intense surge of shame at the thought of what his feet must look and, worse perhaps, smell like, at the end of six hours of strenuous walking and climbing. Yet he said nothing, lifting them one after the other so John could pull off his boots. He tried not to dwell on how soothing it was to be cared for, on how long it’d been since he hadn’t done something by himself - insisted on it, because self-reliance was a quality he’d often been praised for. Being stripped of that autonomy by John, of all people, gave him a rush not unlike the trepidation he’d felt the first time Johnny had mixed him a drink, that familiar fear that he might end up liking something far too much for his own good.

Maybe that was why he didn’t move while John went to place his boots by the door. He could have taken over, removed the old fleece, or peeled off his socks which were soaked through with snow. Instead he waited for John to return, in the darkness of the little refuge with the rumour of the wind outside, and the nearby, restful crackle of the fire.

“You don’t have to,” he said for good measure, when John turned his attention to the temperamental zipper of his fleece.

“I want to.”

When Tom only looked at him in quiet confusion, John leaned in and kissed him. It was little more than a momentary feel of chapped lips and a bearded jaw, not half as tangible as John’s firm grip on his collar, as the repeated murmur of, “I want to,” spoken as he drew back to assess Tom’s reaction.

Tom wrapped a hand around the back of his neck and pulled him back in. 

(And even if he’d wanted to, how could he tell Johnny about this? _It was a clumsy kiss. I think I bit him, actually. I remember that he winced. I had a wild lock of hair that kept falling in my face and he kept having to brush it back. I felt like a horny teenager._ Without even saying all of this out loud, he knows what Johnny would say. _Have you ever actually been a horny teenager, Tom?_ To which he could in all honesty reply, _That night, I was._ )

The first kiss was tentative and the second clumsy, but the third left Tom reeling and by the fourth his hands were under John’s jumper, seeking the warmth of his skin, as John shivered violently against him.

“We need to… We need to get you out of these wet clothes,” John stammered.

Tom knew that they should have a discussion about what they were doing, but that would have meant slowing down or, worse, stopping, retreating, letting space rush back between them like the impenetrable barrier it used to be, and with John kissing him like he couldn’t get enough of his mouth - John’s fingers brushing against skin as he tried to undo Tom’s overtrousers, because to remove his polo-neck jumper would have meant breaking apart for more than the few seconds required to draw breath - Tom couldn’t find it in himself to suggest a cooling chat.

Instead he got rid of his fleece and his damp socks, trying to ignore how silly he must be looking, dancing from foot to foot, pulling off the socks one-handed as he leaned on John’s shoulder, as John smiled at his efforts, a small smile that became laughter against his mouth when Tom tried to divert his attention with a kiss.

“We’ve been stupid,” John informed him, as he unzipped Tom’s trousers and pushed them down around his thighs.

“I know,” Tom said, shoving them the rest of the way down and kicking them away, praying the candles wouldn’t shed too much light on his faded boxers. To say that he hadn’t dressed to impress would have been an understatement.

At the time, it had seemed like John was unaware of his nerves, and it was only later that Tom considered the fact that John might have known - might have known because he was nervous, too, and desperate to hide it. Apprehensive as he may have been, he never showed a moment’s hesitation, and Tom had no sooner got rid of his muddy trousers that he came forward again, rubbing the hem of Tom’s dark polo-neck between his fingers.

“Take this off? I want to look at you. Here.”

He steered Tom towards the table and its two dwindling candles. Tom pulled the polo-neck over his head and did the same with the thinner jumper and tee-shirt he wore underneath, resisting the urge to try and flatten his ruffled hair. It had been a while since he’d felt this self-conscious about his body - his early teens, maybe, when his legs had decided to grow faster than the rest of him.

“Can I?”

At a nod from Tom, John eased the boxers over his hips and down his legs. While Tom tried to get out of them without tripping them both, John stepped fully against him. For some reason, this would remain Tom’s most vivid memory of that night - the soft contact of John’s jumper against his bare chest, the rough contact of John’s trousers against his bare cock, the steady pressure of John’s hands on his hips - and that first brush against John’s clothed erection, the belated realisation that John did indeed want him, that it hadn’t all been some mad attempt at coping with the brutal climb.

He leaned in for a drawn-out kiss, heartbeat thundering in his ears, returning his hands to John’s neck - to his dishevelled hair. 

“You’re blushing?” John whispered. Tom had never heard him use such a tone, brimming with affection and amusement.

“I’ve always been a little intimidated by you... And now you’ve seen me naked. This is either a good dream or everyone’s worst high school nightmare.”

“I know your body better than you think,” John said. “I’ve watched you climb in summer, remember? With your shirt plastered to your skin and those old shorts. I’ve seen… the strain in your arms, when you pull your weight up the rock. The tension in your thighs when you’re abseiling down, every time you’re about to push away from the wall. How you’ll fold in on yourself when you take a nap in the car. Your hands dried and blistered and mending, when you turn the pages of your books. That red patch across your nose and cheeks because you went skiing without any sunscreen. I could draw you with my eyes closed. The only part I hadn’t seen...” He reached down between them, knuckles brushing against the fine trail of hair at Tom’s navel, and lower still, his hand stroking down the length of Tom’s cock, a tentative touch at first until his fist closed around it. Tom gripped the back of his jumper in answer, a quivering sound escaping his lips that he dearly hoped no one else would ever get to hear. 

“There,” John said against his ear. “Now I could paint a complete picture. And have a long wank over it, I suppose.”

“Take off your clothes,” Tom mumbled.

Time and again that night, practicality reassessed itself; it was, after all, very much in their natures. While John was removing the many layers of his winter clothing, Tom fought the penetrating chill by unrolling their mats and spreading out their sleeping bags and those of the covers that weren’t too mouldy. He did worry, along the way, that this return to their usual routine would dissuade John after all. Certainly some of the tension had abated, and with the candles blown out and the only light coming from the foggy window at the front of the stove, it seemed possible that they would get under the crisp synthetic fabric of the sleeping bags and their three additional layers of blankets and fall straight asleep.

As it turned out, however, the interruption had made John more impatient, not less. In the makeshift bed, lying on their sides with their knees touching, they wrung from each other what energy they had left - at the tips of their fingers, in the hollows of their palms, Tom listening for every hitch in John’s breathing to know what he had done right, what motion of his hand on John’s cock must be repeated, a fast, demanding pace, his grip tighter than it would have been if he’d been touching himself. And letting himself be distracted, at times, his hand wandering away to stroke the burning skin between John’s thighs, because it made John groan in protest, deep in his throat, and he’d catch Tom’s wrist to stir his hand upwards.

“I’m close,” Tom warned, as the familiar tension built inside him, John answering in a savage whisper, “Good,” never slowing down the rhythm of his hand. In an instant Tom was brought back to his first year of college, when John had been, first and foremost, the domineering captain of a rowing crew, and he didn’t care to figure out what it was that made him come so hard, that image or the exhaustion or John’s tone or merely the fact that it was John’s hands, rather than his own or anyone else’s, hands that he’d always assumed had been meant for drawing and climbing and little else. Nothing sexual, surely.

He’d never been so happy to be proven wrong.

“Is this…” He didn’t get to finish, in fact he wasn’t sure what he’d meant to say, _alright, good, fast enough, tight enough?_ \- when John interrupted him with a muted “Yes,” the authority fled from his voice, replaced with something that sounded very much like relief. There was a violence to the way his body unwound itself beneath Tom’s hands, like something breaking, something jerking itself loose, and for several minutes afterwards, John was so silent that Tom had to strain to hear his quiet breathing.

By the time John spoke again, Tom half-fancied himself asleep, though he still entertained the thought of getting up and finding something to wipe his hands, something to clean John’s. And maybe he could see if they had any water left, for they were sure to be thirsty during the night, and if there wasn’t any, maybe he would find the courage to head out to collect some snow and set it to melt on the portable stove.

“Thank you,” John murmured.

Tom wasn’t sure what to say, or if John even wanted an answer. And so they remained on their backs, with only an inch of foam separating them from the hard floorboards, with the wind sliding under the metal sheeting of the refuge and making it slap against the walls. After a while, Tom lifted his hand, sticky as it was, and set it on John’s arm. Whatever John did or said after that, Tom didn’t stay awake long enough to find out.

Tom woke up twice during the night. On both occasions his thoughts followed a similar pattern: first he remembered where he was, and how he’d come to be there, bare feet poking out from under the edge of a sleeping bag spread out like a blanket, a real, scratchy blanket pulled high over his chest, with John snoring slightly beside him because he’d caught a cold on the way up. Then he let the dread sink in at the thought that John would wake up regretting what they’d done.

The first time he woke up, he turned around and found John’s back to him and it was all too easy to fit himself against it, to rub his nose against John’s neck until John reached back for his hand and put it on his cock and they engaged in some mindless friction that Tom was ready to blame on their sleepy state and the darkness and the high altitude, though the delusion became hard to uphold when John said, in far too clear a whisper, “You can if you want to.”

Tom didn’t try to pretend that he didn’t understand what John meant.

“Have you ever…”

“Taken it up the arse?” John said, with that hint of humour that Tom had yet to get used to.

“When you put it like that…”

“How do you want me to put it?” John snorted. “Have I ever been sodomised? Buggered? No, I haven’t… But I’ve thought about it. And I’ve been with men before. In college. When I was drunk in college. It doesn’t matter, does it? Will you do it?”

Tom let himself consider it, what it might feel like, to sink inside John inch by inch until he’d gone as deep as he could. Let himself consider it and grow hard at the thought, and then forced himself to think about what could have led John to make the offer.

It wasn’t like John to be reckless. The only reason why he might have suggested it was that he thought this wouldn’t happen again. And yet, if Tom did let it happen, in the state they were in, overwhelmed and frantically tired, it was unlikely to be a pleasant experience for either of them. 

Of all the bad advice Johnny had ever given him, one particular line now came back to haunt him. _You should never, ever, ever go out without a condom. I don’t care if you’re off climbing or going to the supermarket. Be prepared!_ At the time, Tom had had no qualms telling Johnny he was an idiot.

It seemed like the worst possible moment to concede that his brother might have had a point.

He closed his eyes against John’s hair.

“I don’t have any lubrication, or condoms, or… I don’t suppose you do?”

“No,” John said, with a dry laugh. “This took us both by surprise, apparently. Never mind then. Don’t... stop... moving…”

 _Maybe we could stay a day longer,_ Tom thought, knowing very well that if the weather had cleared by morning, they’d have to go down. 

The second time Tom woke up, John was gone. In the grey of dawn the refuge seemed particularly forlorn, with the dried wax of the melted candles and the faded blankets and the dust that covered every surface. Tom took his time getting up. John had lit the stove again and placed Tom’s clothes and boots close to it, as well as a pan full of water. Now Tom remembered stirring once or twice during the night - as John got up to use the bathroom, which was hardly more than a cupboard hiding a dry toilet - and as he went in and out of the refuge, presumably to get some snow to melt.

When he finally stepped outside, having cleaned himself as well as he could, the sun was rising fast over the mountaintops. The sky was a clear blue, the ground a blinding white. John had dusted off a slab of rock at the edge of the snowy little plateau and was now sitting cross-legged over an impressive drop, his notebook balanced on one knee, ballpoint pen moving swiftly across the page. 

“Good morning,” he said, without raising his head.

Tom remained by the door, unsure what John’s mood might be. He didn’t seem troubled. In fact, from a distance he looked much as he always had, focused on the task at hand and unwilling to let any emotion transpire if he could help it.

“Good morning,” Tom ventured.

“Do you still use your books as reminders? You used to write things down, paste in postcards and the like…”

Tom tamped down an impulse to go and shake John free of this poor attempt at a conversation.

“Yeah? I mean... Yeah, I still do.”

“Ah, I thought so,” John said, and left it at that.

Tom watched him in silence for a moment longer, while John hatched a flurry of lines, eyes flicking from the mountains to the page before him. Once he was done he rose from his perch and walked back towards Tom, who found himself wishing he’d had more time to look at him before the candles went out, before his body disappeared once again under some five or six layers of jacket and jumpers and shirts and thermal trousers.

“I needed a minute to think.” John didn’t shy away from his gaze. “If you want more from me than this, I’m not sure that I’m…”

“What do you mean? More than last night?” Tom asked, trying not to frown, though he must have looked crestfallen anyways, because John seized the front of his fleece, much as he had the night before, right before he’d kissed him.

“No, more than… For this to be…”

Tom’s smile was strained.

“Serious?” 

John’s face darkened.

“Of course it’s serious. But I can’t… take this down with us. I’m not ready for that. And I realise it’s asking you too much, and if you’d rather see someone else… Someone that you can see in Cambridge, rather than having me every other month on a mountain, I’ll understand.”

“So what you’re saying,” Tom said quietly, “is that this could happen again, whenever we go walking? And for some reason, you think I’d choose any other option than that?”

For a moment, it looked as if John would argue with him. Whatever it was that swayed him, Tom’s encouraging smile or some memory of the previous night - the perspective of being once again undressed and tenderly taken apart - or the clear morning air and the once dented peaks momentarily made whole by the fresh snow, or the fact that they were so perfectly cut off from the rest of the world, which lay somewhere below the edge of the plateau, under a blanket of white clouds, or maybe the thought of finally getting on his skis and throwing himself at the snow and the slope - John bit back what he’d been about to say.

“I don’t suppose we could spend another night here?” he said instead. “Even though this has to be the least hygienic bed I’d ever slept in, and that’s counting the dormitory at boarding school…”

“We can’t be sure the weather will hold,” Tom reminded him.

In the end, they stayed another three hours, fully aware of how unwise it was to linger. They spent the time talking about Cambridge ( _How was I supposed to know that students couldn’t walk on the grass!_ ), and Tom made them the soggiest porridge they’d ever tasted ( _Reminds me of boarding school as well,_ John remarked, letting some of it splatter back inside the enamel bowl, _stained bed sheets and porridge and handjobs, it’s almost like I’m sixteen again... You wouldn’t have liked me at sixteen, I was rather full of myself…_ ) and once they were done eating, they retreated to the rumpled pile of blankets and sleeping bags ( _You’re still full of yourself, Tom informed him, and it shouldn’t be as attractive as it is_ ). In bed they played a lazy game of war with Tom’s deck of cards ( _Did you and Edward…_ , John asked, flipping over an ace, his tone far too casual for the unfinished question to be benign. - _No,_ Tom said. _And you?_ John shook his head. The sort of no that didn’t commit to anything.)

As they finally packed their bags and prepared to leave, John tore out a page from his notebook and set it down on the table.

“For your book?” He looked unsure. “If you want it. As a souvenir.”

Tom picked up the drawing, where the mountains were a dark grey against the clearer sky of the fading night. John had caught the last stars before the sun came up, and the moon, whose white halo hovered above the tallest peaks.

About two years later, Land had picked the book from its shelf, an old copy of _Treasure Island_ , and he’d found the drawing inside and asked Tom where it came from.

“Old-fashioned,” Land had said, a second maybe before Tom stole the book back from him. “Old-fashioned but there’s some energy in there. It’s daring in its unwillingness to express anything in the landscape, how it says everything through the furious strokes of the pen. Not an artist at heart, though, are they?”

Tom had put the book back on its shelf. It wasn’t the one he’d been reading when they were at the refuge, but he hadn’t liked that book and he liked this one, and he went back to it often enough that he could pretend it wasn’t to get a glimpse of John’s drawing and a potent shot of all the memories associated with it.

“I wouldn’t know,” he told Land. “You’re the artist, not me.” After a moment’s thought, he added, not quite sure why he was doing it, “I like the way he draws glaciers. It’s in the balance of black lines and white space, isn’t it? You have to suggest the… the great expanse of ice but also the places where it folds over, the ridges and the edges of the crevasses, the ice of the terminus with all its… its scars and the places where it’s dirty or worn out. And his drawings have that. The glaciers look like they’re ice. Seas that are dead and alive at the same time. With the unmarked space like the swell of a wave… and the ridges are the places where the sea’s gone, like the wrinkles it leaves behind on the stone, and the crevasses look like the spines of fossilised animals, like fossilised branches.”

He stopped, embarrassed to realise he’d been gesturing as he spoke.

“Hm,” Land said. “Drawing is so dated, though, don’t you think? As a medium.”

In the refuge Tom had ruffled John’s hair and kissed the tip of his freckled nose and John had let him do it with the shyest of smiles. 

“Thank you.”

“It’s just a drawing,” John said.

25.

“So what was the title?”

“What?”

“The drawing. You said he always gave weird titles to the drawings. I’m expecting a punch-line to that anecdote, unless it was as pointless as the bicycle story?”

“ _We see the same stars_ ,” Tom says. “That was the title.”

The exact title had been “… _We see the same stars_ ”, although at the time, Tom hadn’t really paid attention to the punctuation.

“The sex must have been good if it made him see stars.”

“Johnny.”

“Be grateful that I’m reading between the lines, instead of prodding you for details, or this would last a week, not a day and a half with the occasional chamber pot break.”

“Shut up,” Tom sighs, though it lacks energy.

Johnny throws up his hands.

“It’s no good baiting you. You’re too good-natured.”

“It was a quote. The title of the drawing.”

Johnny grins.

“From a love poem?”

Tom looks away. In some ways, in most ways, it has felt surprisingly good to unburden himself to Johnny like this. In others, it’s reminding him of why he’s always been a rather quiet person. Not secretive, but discrete. There was never much use for him to speak up when Johnny was already sucking up so much of the air in the room. In return, Johnny has learned to spring upon every little morsel that Tom lets slip, translating them into the things that Tom can’t bring himself to say. At times, he’s grateful for his brother’s ability to read him like an open book. Right now, he’d rather they were doing this over the phone, so Johnny wouldn’t see him go red in the face.

“It’s from a letter. I didn’t know that back then. It’s from a letter George Mallory wrote to his wife, when he was on a reconnaissance mission on Mount Everest.” 

Johnny gives him a look.

“A letter to his wife?”

“It didn’t seem ironic at the time,” Tom says testily. “It was years before John got married… He didn’t know.” _Four years before he got married - two years before he got engaged._

Still, it has him wonder: did John already know? They’d rarely ever discussed what they wanted from life before that day, and on the one occasion when there’d been a general conversation on the subject, one evening at a pub in London with Graham and Edward in attendance, John had said that he wanted “a home of his own,” qualifying his idea of a home as “a wife and children, and a house.”

 _It’s a good thing we don’t all stand by that definition, or we’d both be homeless forever,_ Edward had said afterwards, throwing an arm around Tom’s shoulders as they set off towards the underground.

Maybe the irony doesn’t lie in the fact that George Mallory had been writing to his wife, but rather in the fact that John had borrowed Mallory’s words to write to a man. It sounds very much like John to have accidentally expressed something he couldn’t allow himself to want: the steadying bonds of domesticity, albeit shared with a man, rather than a woman. 

“We’d take off as often as we could,” Tom says. “The rest of the time, we had our jobs - our lives in Cambridge and London. It went on for almost two years.”

“So basically, some kind of English Brokeback.”

“He’s Scottish.” 

“He’s the least Scottish-sounding Scot I’ve ever come across,” Johnny laughs. “Do you know mum bought him a hot chocolate? He was trying to get coffee from the vending machine and she gave him a talk about how caffeine is bad for your nerves, and…” - he adopts a higher pitch that has little to do with their mother’s voice, though the resolute tone is familiar - “Haven’t your nerves been through enough already, John?”

Tom grimaces.

“Oh. What did he do?”

“Sat on his plastic chair and sipped his chocolate. Pretended it was good, even. He definitely won points for that.”

Tom can picture it all too well, John sitting in an uncomfortable chair with his overcoat folded over his arm, taking a gulp of lyophilised chocolate each time Sarah looked his way. Smiling because that was expected of him. Sarah would not have been fooled by that polite facade.

“Is he coming back?” Johnny asks. A characteristic move: distracting his opponent with jokes so his underhanded question will have a better chance of getting a candid answer.

Tom sees straight through it, but he chooses to answer anyways.

“Day after tomorrow, if I want him to.”

“Do you?”

26.

As he tries to tell Johnny about the years that followed, Tom realises it has also been a long time since he’s allowed himself to think about them. “Almost two years,” he’d said, and that must have been accurate, from a purely factual standpoint: from early 2013 to mid-2015, or thereabouts. He was 26 when they fumbled their way into the refuge and 28 when they parted at St Pancras, Tom oblivious to the fact that it was the last time John would kiss him for quite some time - the first and last time he’d kiss him publicly, in the middle of the bright, airy gallery, with enough desperation that Tom should have known, really, that things were about to go downhill.

It might amount to two years but it was a collection of moments, of getaways planned months in advance or improvised last minute, John calling him on a Friday, “Are you free? I’ll pick you up.” Tom didn’t so much keep his weekends free in the hope that this would happen as he did cancel other plans, once or twice, because there was more appeal in driving off to Wales with John than there was in a university social or dinner at James’ with the rest of the Polar Club or a hike with the hillwalking club. 

He enjoyed the walks themselves, of course, the bone-deep drag of exhaustion at the end of a long hike, the shelter of a forest as the trees closed in around them or the way the world opened where the forest ended, hills rolling off into the distance under a stormy grey sky, the uncomplicated joy of a swig of water and a bite of a cereal bar before they walked on, the challenge of a wall to climb that filled him with anticipation long before they reached the foot of it, the ritual of unrolling the rope and unclipping a carabiner from his backpack. The blissful naps in the grass, the ground uneven but steadying beneath his back, waking up to find John sketching at his side. Then Tom would reach out to signal he was awake, briefly grasping the back of John’s muddy boot.

Things would have come to a head sooner if he hadn’t craved this as well: being apart from the world and having John to himself. 

Sometimes they did encounter people on these walks, and an outing could go by during which they barely touched each other, having spent the day walking and the evening socialising with the family they’d run into at the mountain hut, before they all retreated to the same dormitory. 

Tom enjoyed each and every outing regardless of how it played out. There was a perverse pleasure to be had in their lack of definite plans when the both of them were usually so dependable, so organised. In those days they’d let luck and the weather decide for them what their evenings would be like. If the hut was empty but for the two of them, John would find occasions to brush against Tom - he’d let himself be cornered moments after the door had closed behind them so Tom might kiss him - he’d smile more often and even laugh at times, the sound of it rare enough that it always caught Tom by surprise. Truth be told, Tom also smiled more in those days. His joy was a quiet thing, but he couldn’t have hidden it if he’d wanted to - it felt as if it was bigger than him.

Once they were done preparing the route and their backpacks for the following day, John would get into bed with him, be it a real bed or a hard bunk, and although Tom has never thought of himself as being particularly sex-driven, this might yet be the easiest way for him to make sense of the order of events: there was the week-end in the Lake District where he went down on his knees before John could think to tell him not to, John’s head hitting the wall with a soft thud as Tom took him in his mouth - there was the dreadful walk along the Welsh coast, mud up to their ankles, rain pelting down on their heads, after which John called dibs on the hotel room shower and then changed his mind, telling Tom they “might as well share,” before he reached for Tom with damp hands and pulled his t-shirt over his head - there was the day they turned in early at a hut in Snowdonia, the sun beaming outdoors, the dormitory unappealing, as well-lit as a dungeon and smelling like a locker room, and yet they spent four hours there before dinner, with John lying face down, eyes shut against his arm, as Tom waited to be told to - Move. Now. Yes - more.

They had sex in the cold dormitories of empty huts and in cheap hotel rooms and in B&Bs that had remained stuck in the 70s, and that one time in a tent, Tom couldn’t say where, maybe in Wales again, maybe in the Peak District, coming out for air afterwards, with just a shove of his upper body outside the tent, shivering as the breeze swept across his damp skin. 

_It’s been years since I’d seen so many stars,_ John had said, and Tom had replied without thinking, _I need to take you to the North. You’d see them better - you’d see more of them. If I took you to Greenland, you’d see what I meant… The stars by night. By day it’s the sea turning to ice the closer you get to the glacier, and the mate calling down when we come too close to an iceberg…_ He’d stopped, frustrated that his words couldn’t seem to convey more than a feeble echo of what he remembered, worried also that he might have crossed a line. Perhaps he should have phrased it differently, steering closer to their usual script, something like, _We could go hiking in Greenland, which was a very different thing to say than, I need to take you somewhere._

John was lying beside him, with his legs inside the tent and his back in the grass, and even in the dark Tom could see the red patch on his neck where his stubble had chafed John’s skin.

 _If we can make it work,_ John said. _I’d like to go, someday._

Indeed, they’d been in the Peak District, because Tom also remembers their walk the next day, how John wore some grey t-shirt that was designed to look simple but that must have cost as much as Tom’s hiking boots, and how John hadn’t tried to hide the marks on his neck, even as a group of retirees stopped alongside them for lunch and one of the women gave him a knowing look. He just cast his eyes down and smiled to himself, as if he’d finally stopped caring.

In those years, it had been and it hadn’t been about the sex. It had been and it hadn’t been about the walking.

“Wasn’t this asking you a bit much?” Johnny asks. “To go on ‘hiking’ getaways and not tell anyone that you were actually…” Tom sees Johnny hesitate on the verge of either shagging or boning or fucking before he settles on, “... seeing each other?”

“I didn’t mind.”

Johnny pulls a face at him, and yet Tom isn’t lying. He had his work in Cambridge and his work in the field, the occasional glacier trips that could last weeks if not months, sleeping on a boat or close to the ice, wherever his team would set up camp, usually within reach of whatever costly instrument they’d brought along, lasers and seismometers, the oceanographers’ complex carousel of sensors and sampling bottles arranged on a round metal frame. Days spent staring at the ice, the white and blue and black icebergs that toppled over with a sound like a storm, running water and cracking thunder, the concrete-coloured ice along a glacier terminus in Greenland, the blue fjord lapping along its base, the creased and crumpled ice along the glacier’s edges, water pooling blue in the moulins, those holes carved by ice-melt - the cruel reverberation of light on the snow across the white ice-shelves in Antarctica, which looked so different from the glaciers he’d seen elsewhere, glaciers that had had a bit of a rough and tumble down a mountain before they got to their valleys and their fjords. Flat ice and broken ice. The smell of the research stations, a clean, medical smell, overlaid with coffee and everyone’s favourite jumpers that hadn’t seen the washer in months. Tom lived in easy camaraderie with his teammates in the field, content to be there for as long as it lasted - content to be there because it never lasted too long. 

He’d never been one to settle, or rather, he’d never been given a strong enough incentive not to pack up his bags and go. At the time however, he didn’t know that. He simply thought that he’d always be on the move, and so as time went by, it started to look like maybe he could have it all, the travelling and the staying put, mountains for work and mountains for leisure, John’s friendship and John booking them a private room one night at the hostel where their walk ended because _I haven’t seen you in two months. I want to sleep with you, not… with you and ten other people. Indulge me._

“You never minded the secrecy, then?” Johnny asks.

“Not really. I’ve never been… Until we started talking about this I never felt the need to… I’m a very private person,” Tom concludes awkwardly.

Johnny rolls his eyes.

“Boy, don’t we know. If Crozier hadn’t called us, would we even have found out that something had happened to you? Jesus, Tom. There’s being private and there’s being way too secretive for your own good, I’ll let you guess which category you belong to.”

“I would have called you,” Tom protests, which is also a way to prolong this argument rather than to dwell on the conversation that preceded it. Tom would rather not admit that there was a good reason why he hadn’t told anyone at the time - why he hadn’t told Johnny. The few people who might have extracted the truth from him had been conspicuously absent from his life at the time.

It was easy to evade the questions of his work colleagues, even Blanky or Crozier, who would never have pried - and it was amusing to let his friends in Cambridge take wild guesses as to what his love life might be like and who it might involve, which had led, at times, to some outlandish bets. Of the old crowd, there was James Fitzjames who’d offered to set him up with a considerable number of his friends and acquaintances, and who’d ambushed him once at an Italian restaurant with an insufferable rich boy who’d also turned out to be a climate change denier. By the end of the meal, it was James who’d swung a punch at the guy’s face. There was also Graham Gore, but Graham was John’s friend before he was Tom’s, and Tom had never had any conversation with him that had gone far below the surface. And of course there was Johnny, or rather, Johnny’s absence. Since he’d started getting serious with his girlfriend, Tom had been hearing from him less and less, until he decided to take a step back as well. It was self-preservation to a degree, but also a petty move, which he was well aware of: if Johnny didn’t see fit to share whatever was going on in his life, then Tom wouldn’t share anything either.

The one person to whom he might have turned to for support or advice was studying settlements in Alaska. Edward knew John better than most people, had known him long before Tom had met either of them, and Tom did sometimes wonder what would have happened if he’d told him. Would Edward have been disbelieving, or compassionate, or would he have warned Tom ahead of time? And even if he had, would that have changed anything, really? If Edward had said, “It won’t last,” what other answer could Tom have made than, “Maybe, but I’ll enjoy it while it does?”

27.

Had the circumstances been different, maybe they would have gone on for several more months - several more years - as they had until then. Tom was not one to linger on imaginary scenarios and failed alternatives, but in this case, it did cause him to wonder.

As it was, in the winter of 2015, the circumstances were the following, namely that Tom had gone to Antarctica with his PhD supervisor, Dr James Reid, to drill the ice for samples, and that he’d returned from Antarctica alone, after James Reid had driven his snowmobile into a crevasse. The scientist had died on impact, Tom was told, but it had taken them the better part of a day to retrieve his body from the depths of the Ross Ice Shelf.

Tom did not have to stop in London. There were trains leaving every other hour that could have taken him to Cambridge, and straight back to his college, to his room that hadn’t been aired in a month, to his empty fridge and his cold bed and the compassionate glances of the students and postdocs at the Polar Research Institute.

There was no justifiable reason for him to contact John. This wasn’t the way things were between them. They didn’t always keep in touch between walks, and Tom hadn’t heard from him in the past two months since he’d left for the South Pole.

But he was so tired. It was pernicious, this exhaustion. It dug ravines and holes inside him that his good sense could fall into, never to resurface.

_In London. Time for tea if by any chance you’re free?_

It was a Saturday morning, the sky foggish and grey, London showing its most unappealing sides, tar and concrete and worn-down brick fronts and dirty awnings, cars splashing pedestrians as they rushed by.

 _Come on by_ , John wrote back.

Tom recognised the street, the metal front door, the pub around the corner that had disgorged drunken party-goers on New Year’s Eve, two years ago. John answered the door in a smart black jumper and dark grey slacks, which must have been his understanding of a casual week-end outfit. Tom let his enormous backpack sink to the ground and embraced him. For some reason, he’d thought John would smell different here, more urban, more corporate maybe, but it was the same smell that he’d sought on those nights in the hostels and huts, rubbing his nose against John’s neck, mindless of the stubble, mindful of John’s fingers as they twisted and pulled at his hair. It was hardly any longer now than it used to be, an extra inch at most, but that was enough to give John a better grip, and Tom resolved not to get it cut again for the foreseeable future.

“You must be exhausted,” John said, loosening his hold on Tom’s shoulders. “Do you want to crash for a minute? I’ll fix you some lunch.”

Which was about when Tom decided that perhaps what they had hadn’t been exactly what he wanted, hadn’t been enough, because all of a sudden he was craving this as well: the relief of that embrace, the domesticity; someone willing to take care of him after two ten-hour flights.

He put his backpack by the door and sat down on the leather sofa, careful not to disturb anything. From the living-room he had a clear view of the open-plan kitchen where John had started to pull all manner of vegetables from the fridge.

“Is a stir-fry alright? I have the ingredients for a stew, but that would take ages.”

“A stir-fry is perfect, thanks.”

Tom’s eyes drifted towards the pair of French windows that led onto a narrow balcony. Beyond it he could see the back of buildings and the rest was easy to imagine, the kind of parking and courtyard you needed a code to get into, a few trees to give the illusion of greenery sprouting from concrete. On the coffee-table before him was the book he’d given John for his last birthday, hiking routes in the Swiss Alps, illustrated with endless pictures of tall fir trees and walls of granite that nature had sculpted like fortresses, with buttresses and rampart walks, and crystal peaks that looked like a hard, well-applied pinch might shatter them, and chalets with wooden trim and bright green shutters that could have been cut out of a travel agency’s crisp, shiny brochure. 

_Is that a suggestion?_ John had asked when he’d unwrapped it, flicking through the pages with a half-smile.

 _Only if you want it to be?_ Tom had answered, because he hadn’t really thought about it - he’d never been one for double entendres - but if John was willing to go to Switzerland with him, he wasn’t about to turn him down.

His eyes fell from the book to his boots and to the elaborate rug beneath them, and he immediately set to undoing his laces with shaking hands.

“Oh god, I’m so sorry…”

“Whatever you did, I’m not sure it warrants God’s intervention,” John called back from the kitchen, from where he was busy chopping carrots. There was too much warmth in his tone for it to be a reproach, and yet when Tom failed to answer he felt the need to clarify anyways, “I was joking. Do you have anything against red onions? I have a few left that I… Tom? Hartnell, hey. Hey.”

The last word he’d spoken from Tom’s side, with a hand set carefully upon his knee. Tom latched onto it, ashamed to find that he was still shaking, from caffeine and too little sleep and thoughts that he’d refused to contemplate until then. Cracks in the ice, matters of life and death.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, letting go of John’s hand. Shying away from John’s look of concern, he picked up his boots to set them aside, away from the rug. “I’m just…”

“How about…Let’s just lie down for a minute. Here.”

“I haven’t showered since I left New Zealand, I only changed in the bathroom at Heathrow, I must be…”

John silenced him with a kiss and there was little for Tom to do but to let himself be kissed, and manoeuvered back onto the sofa, John settling down beside him with the ease of one long used to sharing the narrow bunks of small mountain huts.

“Do you have to get back today?” John asked, in a murmur, as if the sudden proximity warranted this change in the pitch of his voice, from gentle authority to gentler persuasion. The hand stroking Tom’s side under his t-shirt and jumper made it difficult to focus on John’s words. “There’ll be trains tomorrow. Get some rest.”

Tom did consider it - quite literally crashing on John’s couch after he’d left dirt on his rug, his monstrous backpack leaned against the living-room wall where some zipper or other would undoubtedly end up scratching the pristine grey-blue paint, falling asleep here and pulling John under with him, thoroughly entangled and thus unable to return to his cooking and his day off.

“I’d rather not sleep,” he said.

“You’d rather not sleep,” John repeated. “Tom, have you seen your…”

This time around, it was Tom who kissed him quiet. Clothes were shed with brisk efficiency, and Tom didn’t slow down to think about what he was trying to achieve, though it would occur to him later that - aside from the withdrawal symptoms of two months spent away, looking at a picture of John on his phone each time he gave in to the illusory comfort of some temporary release - in some way he was staking a claim, proving to himself that John wanted him to be here, that John could want him in London, in this living-room that looked like a spread from a magazine, much as he’d wanted him amid the heather and scree and snow. 

At first glance, John had seemed a far-cry from what he was like in the mountains, with his black cashmere jumper, his beard neatly trimmed, that confident posture that John and Graham and Edward seemed to put on like a tailored coat whenever they were in London. Tom had forgotten that this was what John was like most of the time, that the laid-back side that he’d discovered - John’s edges softened, polished in places by Tom’s restless hands - was usually hidden from view. To find him again here in London filled Tom with pure, unspeakable relief, like a return to blessed silence after hours if not days of a constant drone. 

Along with the familiarity of the motions came the familiarity of John’s body, lean and strong and so pliant under his hands. Tom let himself realise how much he’d missed this, not only in Antarctica but in Cambridge as well, every sexually charged moment that he used to think were pleasurable but certainly not necessities of life, the mindless grinding, the kissing until his mouth became tender and sore, the rough rasp of stubble against his neck, what it felt like to rest his head against John’s thigh, with John’s taste still on his tongue, as John ran absent-minded fingers through his hair. The deep contentment of it, as if his body didn’t care much that his head was heavy, that the rug was chafing his knees, that he remained achingly hard - what did it matter when this discomfort was a mere prelude to what would come next, those few moments when he would hold himself up, hold himself back, with trembling arms, until John began to meet his steady thrusts, heels digging in at the small of Tom’s back, and Tom’s release would come as a regret and come as a relief, draining the last of his energy before he sank down, John tucking his head under his chin, holding him close.

“Your sofa,” Tom said. “Shouldn’t I… If you have a towel I’ll try to…”

“Never mind the bloody sofa,” John mumbled. “Don’t move.”

Soon enough they did move, in a joint venture to the bathroom where Tom let John wash the long journey off of him, with fervent hands, his touch assured but unhurried, so that by the time he was done, Tom was more than ready to push him back against the foggy glass, John turning around without much protest beyond a level-voiced warning, “If I can’t walk to work tomorrow, you’ll be hearing from me.”

At the back of his mind, Tom reminded himself that he’d leave afterwards - he’d get dressed and pick up his bag and he’d go back to the station before John could begin to think that he’d overstayed his welcome.

In the bedroom, he told himself the same thing as he set his head upon the pillow and John came to join him under the clean, striped duvet. _Just a nap, and then I’ll get up and leave._

And he thought about it again much later that evening, after they’d had sex in John’s bed, with John sitting astride him, setting an uneven rhythm that wasn’t so much slow as it was lazy, exhaustion finally catching up with them. Tom would have stayed awake hours longer for that feeling of being joined, the dizzying heat of it, the sight of John sinking down on his cock with something close to abandon, a dark lock falling into his eyes, mouth parted on a shaken breath. 

_Get up_ , he thought, as they lay side by side on the bed, John’s arm thrown over his waist.

“I could take a day off on Monday,” John murmured. “If you… If you’d like to stay. If I take a day off, will you go away with me, tomorrow?”

Tom exhaled as softly as he could, lest John should find out he’d been holding his breath.

“Yes,” he said.

Around dinner time, John resumed cooking the vegetables that he’d left strewn about the worktop, and Tom told him about the death of his supervisor, which earned him a sideways glance and raised eyebrows, but no other comment as to the strange timing of that announcement.

“These things happen more often than you’d think, in my line of work,” Tom tried to explain.

“Glaciologists falling into crevasses? It’s not so surprising, when you think about it,” John said, from where he was pushing onions and carrots around a saucepan. 

Tom hadn’t eaten since the prepackaged meal on the plane and the smell of food was making his mouth water. Sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, he watched the back of John’s head and the nape of his neck, let his eyes stray down to his arse, to his ankles showing under the rolled up cuffs of an old pair of jeans. The prim and proper image John had projected upon Tom’s arrival was little more than a distant memory. Tom himself had handed over his clothes to be washed; with all the laundry he’d brought back from Antarctica, there’d been enough to fill the machine. Now he tried not to feel self-conscious, sitting there in his underwear and one of John’s jumpers, thick navy wool that felt suitably heavy on his tired frame. They’d slept a few hours and yet he felt restless, unsure whether he wanted to go back to bed and accept that this had all been some hallucination of his tired brain, or to jump off the stool and corner John against the hob, reassuring himself once again that it had all been real.

“Should I be worried about you, then?” John asked. 

“I’ve yet to fall into a crevasse that I can’t climb out of,” Tom said, or bragged, maybe.

John snorted.

“Thank you Tom, this is profoundly reassuring. I’m very sorry, in any case. About your supervisor.”

“Me too. He was a good scientist. He had this whole project… with scientists in California and NASA, satellite imagery to map out the fluctuations of ice in Antarctica. Antarctica’s rather his specialty than mine, land ice and sea ice, the evolution of ice shelves. The ice in Antarctica looks nothing like the glaciers I usually work on. Blanky introduced me to him, that was years ago. He said he’d take over, Thomas Blanky. He’ll supervise the rest of my PhD, along with Cassie - Dr Morton. I think I told you about her, she was on my team in Greenland…”

“The woman who also flies helicopters. I remember. Is there anyone in this job who isn’t a daredevil?”

“Well, me,” Tom reminded him, for which he was rewarded with a smile, John drifting over to kiss him before he returned to his stir-fry.

“Please be careful.”

“You know I am. Blanky used to say I was a natural - at home on the ice.”

“If I hear you’ve fallen into a crevasse on the other side of the world, God help me…”

“Now, what does God have to do with this?” Tom smiled.

From the tense set of John’s shoulders however, it was rather obvious that the joke was lost on him. 

Tom slid off the stool and came to stand behind him, folding his arms around his waist, making sure not to take him by surprise although he’d realised, by that point, that John no longer startled as easily as he once had - that he could welcome unexpected touches, if Tom was the one to touch him.

John leaned back against him with a sigh.

“I have no idea what I’m doing,” he admitted.

“A stir-fry?” Tom supplied, desperate to lighten the mood.

Later on he thought about this moment again as one of those signs that he should have noticed, subtle indications of a crisis that might have been averted. But he had been so intent on pretending that he was weathering it all, Dr Reid’s death and the long journey home and the long field trip away from John, that he’d failed to realise that John was also falling apart, and that he was making as much of an effort to hide it.

Tom left most of his belongings at John’s, packing only what he might need for two days in the mountains. _How do you feel about Scotland?_ John had asked, and Tom had said yes, despite the fact that Scotland was six hours away by train and that it seemed a long way to go for a two-day outing. After all, it was hardly the first time they went out of their way to spend time with each other, and he assumed that John wanted to get back on familiar terrain - in Scotland, maybe, but also in their usual setting of hills and green-banked rivers and quiet forests, where social conventions had become overgrown or softened by moss and ferns and the sheltering dark of far-reaching shadows.

He was still terribly weary besides. Most of that train ride he spent catching up on sleep, having accepted the scarf John had wordlessly extended to him to use as a pillow. When he began to emerge, the factories and shopping centres and residential suburbs around London had been replaced by tall black forests and grey and yellow hills. At his side John was reading, his knee pressed against Tom’s.

28.

“We were worried about you. You’re aware of that, aren’t you?”

Tom gives Johnny a puzzled look.

“Your prof had just died and you weren’t being very communicative,” Johnny elaborates. “Mum called you everyday, and then she’d call me - ‘He’s hiking in Scotland today. I’m relieved, Johnny, because you know that’s how Tom processes his emotions. By walking. I hope it’ll do him good and that this friend of his is looking after him.’ And I know, I _know_ I said something like, ‘You do realise all the walking might be a metaphor, right?’” Johnny shakes his head. “Dear Sarah. ‘Of _course_ I know that, Johnny. But you’d think it would have stopped being a metaphor five years ago, when he came out to us!’ Or was it five years? I’m reenacting this from memory, so it might not be perfectly accurate.”

“I do like walking,” Tom points out. “It was never meant to be… I did go walking when I told you I was going walking. It wasn’t a lie. Although that time in Scotland, we didn’t walk much.” Before Johnny’s eyebrows can rise even further, he hastens to add, “We spent time with his family. In Edinburgh. We did climb Arthur’s Seat when we got there, because the weather was alright, but afterwards we went to visit his father and the whole family was there.”

John had apologised about it, and judging from his momentary panic as they stepped into his father’s library, the blood all but drained from his face, his hands balled into fists as he stood next to Tom and took in the gathered clan, it was likely that he was telling the truth when he said he’d had no idea that, in his words, “They’d all come round to gawp.”

Tom had known that John was close to his father, who’d started practising law in Edinburgh in his twenties and had never moved away from his flat on Princes Street, a few floors above his former practice - not when he’d married John’s mother, not when she had passed away a decade later, when John was still a child, and not when he’d finally retired, which was still a recent event around the time of Tom’s visit. In appearance at least, John Irving Senior wasn’t half as strict as John himself, a lanky man who came to Tom’s shoulder, with flyaway brown hair and an antiquated moustache and good jumpers sprinkled with dust from the bookshelves and grey hair from the long-haired cat that Tom had seen slinking around the corners of the flat.

“The glaciologist!” he’d said, with a warm smile, taking both of Tom’s hands in his. His eyes were lighter than John’s, a clearer shade of blue. “John told us about your work. From a distance, your glaciers sound like the most inhospitable place on Earth…”

“As a matter of fact, Tom told me they’d found life under the ice in Antarctica,” John said. “Microbes, isn’t it?”

“Yes, in subterranean lakes,” Tom said, still unsure of how he might have ended up here. “An American team drilled down to it past the ice, a year ago it was, I think.”

John and him both knew one of the microbiologists who’d assisted in the collection of samples. Charles Des Voeux, the haughty Cambridge postdoc who’d been on Tom’s first expedition to the Arctic, where Des Voeux had lost his wits after one too many days on the ice and had shot their meteorologist in the leg. Neither Tom nor Edward had any love lost where Des Voeux was concerned.

“And of course there’s the penguins and the seals,” John went on, as they followed his father through the flat. “Tom, you need to show him that picture of you with the penguin.”

“That wasn’t my most professional moment,” Tom said, slightly embarrassed, at which point they stepped into the library and came upon the rest of the family, and John froze on the spot.

“We were just passing by,” one of John’s brothers said, as bare-faced a lie as Tom had ever witnessed.

“You were just passing by,” John repeated. “From Aberdeen.”

“Well, you never come by, we weren’t about to miss this. I’m Lewis,” John’s brother added, moving forward to shake Tom’s hand. “This is my wife, Kate. This is David, our younger brother.”

“They’ll never let me forget I’m the youngest,” David grinned, stepping forward in turn. “I don’t know if you have any siblings, but…”

“Here, take a seat, Tom,” Kate offered, clearing a chair covered in rolled up maps and leather-bound books. “Can I call you Tom?” Her eyes were startling, almond-shaped and serpentine green. “John said you two went walking in the Alps and I have questions. Lewie insists that we have to have a honeymoon, and I figured, if we’re going to travel, we might as well climb a few mountains…”

John’s father had whisked him away under the pretext of showing him a book he’d recently acquired. Even from the other end of the room, John kept darting worried glances in Tom’s direction. A few feet away, David had opened the bar and was pouring everyone drinks. John’s younger brother was shorter and stouter than John, with one of the thickest beards Tom had ever seen, which combined with his grey fisherman’s jumper gave him the premature appearance of an old sea dog. Lewis, meanwhile, looked rather like their father, tall and lean, with freckles and a halo of unruly brown hair and those same light blue eyes. Of all the Irvings in the room, only the father and his daughter-in-law spoke with a Scottish accent.

_(So you went from being the secret boyfriend to meeting the in-laws in the span of what, a five hour train-ride?)_

_(They were nice_ , Tom said, which falls woefully short, of course, of recounting the experience.)

John’s family had been nothing but welcoming, though the day they spent there was enough for some tensions to resurface. John’s father did not say it to John’s face, but he did mention to Tom that he would have wanted John to continue in his field of study, mathematics for the sake of mathematics, rather than to make a career in finance. From the way he brought about the subject, Tom gathered that the man was more complex than he’d thought at first glance, the sort of person who would impart opinions discreetly enough that they seemed like passing thoughts or well-meaning advice, although in the long run, they were probably meant to sway you to his will. David had recently left his job at a sheep farm, and there were some doubts as to whether he had any idea what he’d do next. Lewis had followed in his father’s footsteps, but one did not need good observation skills to be able to tell that John was his father’s favourite, which took its toll on both Lewis and John (David meanwhile, remained supremely unconcerned).

Nevertheless, John had a loving family, and the flat held traces of a happy childhood, down to the bedrooms of each son, which had been kept in their original disposition since they’d left the nest. This meant that Kate and Tom got to sleep in single beds while Lewis and John took up residence on camping mats on the floor. 

Tom had thought at first that he’d been brought there in a friendly capacity, John’s hiking mate with the job that made for interesting dinner talk - John’s father must have been fond of that idea because he’d invited several friends to join them all for dinner, and Tom was called upon on several occasions to talk about Antarctica, and Greenland, and the Alps, about ice cores and global warming and Des Voeux’s microbes in the subterranean lakes. There were also indications, however, that John’s family knew more than they let on, whether John had been open with them, or whether they’d guessed it on their own, which seemed the more likely option. _I’m sorry, there’s no double beds in this house,_ John’s father had apologised, as he showed Tom around the flat. And there’d been Kate saying, _He talked about you so often that I just got used to asking him how you’ve been doing each time I get him on the phone._

Once they retreated to John’s room for the night, Tom finally let out his breath after the relentless socialising. For a while he just looked around, at the star chart on the wall and the broken telescope by the window, at the little desk, where he spied the old tin watercolour box from their hillwalking days and a leather-bound Bible set atop a crinkled sketchbook. When he moved towards the corkboard above the desk, John turned on the desk lamp so Tom would be able to make out the postcards and prayers and poems and pictures. To one side of the board, John had pinned a playing card that Tom recognised although he’d never seen it before, because it had always been missing from the deck Edward had given him. The ace of spades, with a “T” stamped in each corner and a crudely-drawn lighthouse in the centre, the spade drawn upon the shaft.

“You can take it, if you like,” John told him.

“I’m used to having an incomplete deck... It always felt like it was missing more than one card. I think Edward said Russian decks followed the German decks, which have fewer cards than the French decks? I don’t even know if he got it in Russia.”

“He got it on a train. We went on a school trip to Poland when we were fourteen or fifteen. He traded it with a Polish student against a French tarot deck.” John’s expression was difficult to read. Embarrassed, maybe. Wistful. “He let me pick a card and gave me a look when I chose this one. I assumed the lighthouse was a covert reference to homosexuality. But I think it’s meant to represent freedom.”

Tom smiled, wistfully as well, at the thought of shy Edward somehow getting his hands on the most extravagant card deck, at the card itself, at the few pictures all around it of a much younger John, ill-at-ease with himself, surrounded by his peers on the day of his graduation, well-dressed and solemn and sullen, and by his family and friends, in various snapshots of a birthday, or of a camping trip, where the mask fell away and Tom recognised John as he’d come to know him, good-hearted and confused and tentatively happy.

“You told your family about me,” he ventured.

“Of course I did.” John pushed the watercolour box aside and sat down upon the desk. “So, what do you think?”

Tom sat down beside him, sideways so he could look out the window with its nine square panes, a window from another era, opening onto so many buildings it looked as if they were climbing upon one another, brick and sandstone and concrete, tiles old and new, black roofs and shiny brown roofs, the sky above them a dull grey turning the colour of slate as the sun went down.

“Should we redefine the rules here?” Though Tom wasn’t sure how to say what he wanted to say, it seemed as good a time as any to try and express it. “Should we bring what we have… out there… Should we bring it back here?”

“You mean, should I start introducing you to people as my boyfriend?” 

“I don’t…,” Tom fumbled. “It doesn’t have to be…”

John shifted on the desk so they were face to face. 

“It’s a legitimate question. I wouldn’t want you to think that I… That I’ve been leading you up the garden path.”

“I don’t think that,” Tom frowned. “I value what he have. We can do whatever you like. We can continue as before, if that’s what you want.”

“You shouldn’t have to bend over backwards to fit my identity crises,” John said. “I’ll think about it, alright? And I’m sorry about today. I should have booked us a hotel, but…” He shook his head. “I’ve always felt safe here, and naively maybe, I thought that...”

“I do,” Tom interrupted him, and gently kicked his foot. “I do feel safe. With you, I usually do.”

“Oh,” John said. Nothing more than that, but he slid off the desk and pulled Tom to the bed and they succeeded in sharing it, by virtue of being both on the lean side, and rather used to sleeping entangled.

(There is no other way forward than to state it as it happened.)

( _The next day, John ended things._ )

29.

He would be lying if he said that he hadn’t seen it coming. In some ways, he’d been expecting John to change his mind from the moment he’d first given in. But as time went by it’d become easier to push those worries to the back of his mind.

“We never talked about it, aside from that moment early on when he said he wanted us to keep this separate from the rest of our lives, and that moment at the end when I asked if he’d consider… I don’t know. Openly dating me? I used to think that if I’d chosen the right words, he wouldn’t have freaked out the way he did.”

“Sounds to me like he freaked himself out,” Johnny says. “I’ve got to say, not that I want to judge your taste in men or anything… Oh, don’t look at me like that. From where I’m standing, it’s obvious that you deserve better than a guy who can’t make up his mind.”

“Then I haven’t been telling this story properly,” Tom frowns. “Of course John is… John is a complicated man. But I’m also… I was gone for months at a time. I’d been putting work first for so long I didn’t know what anything else would look like. I got a glimpse of that in Scotland, but by then John was already panicking and we’d created this… this habit of not talking to each other. It would never have occurred to him to tell me he was afraid. He’d been brought up with this idea of what his life was supposed to look like, and the idea of risking anything else, it terrified him. And I never told him that I… I never told him much. It felt like if I started talking it would break the spell. Even when he told me it was over I didn’t…”

 _I don’t think this is working for either of us,_ John had said. It sounded rehearsed - he might as well have been reading it out from a piece of paper. _I’ve been cruel to you, letting this go on for as long as it did, and I think we should stop._

Tom had got up from his desk and stepped out of the Polar Research Institute into the thin March drizzle. Before he answered, he made sure to be leaning against a wall, and even then, all he managed was a feeble-voiced, “Okay.”

“I’m sorry,” John said. 

There was something wrong with his voice, and Tom said the only thing he could think of to try and help him out.

“Okay, it’s okay. It’s alright,” he lied.

He didn’t say, _We could work this out,_ or, _I meant what I said, I’d rather have you on occasion than not have you at all,_ or, _Stop lying to yourself,_ or, _You’re making the wrong decision and it’s going to give us both the kind of scars that never really fade._

It wasn’t only that he was responding to an impulse, trying to be comforting, putting John’s needs ahead of his own. For the first time in his life, maybe, he’d also come across an obstacle that he didn’t have the courage to meet head on. He had no energy for this conversation. The words would come to him later, once it was much too late. As it was, he just repeated it, _It’s alright,_ letting the warmth of those two years seep into his tone, some final declaration that wouldn’t do much good to either of them. 

Once they’d hung up, he went back to his desk, pulled open the computational model he’d been working on, and went straight back to work. If he looked paler than he’d been before, if his hand gripped the mouse a bit too tight, no one commented on it. After all, they had all lost a colleague a few weeks before. 

Later in the afternoon, Blanky stopped by on his way out and set a cup of tea at his side, the saucer full of whatever snacks he’d been able to find in the little kitchen, tiny KitKats and Mars bars and left-over candy from the Christmas party.

“When you’re done with that, I need you to check in with the new kid,” he said. “The laser data crashed his computer again. I don’t see what the point is of us having state-of-the-art tech on the field if we can’t unpack the data it gives us at home. Ah, and tonight, you’re going out with Francis and me. Drinks. Keep up the good work, son.”

More than the snacks, this was the sign that told Tom he must have looked ghastly - this rare compliment, delivered with the kind of smile that made Tom’s throat clench as he tried to keep the distress from showing on his face.

On the train back from Edinburgh, they’d played cards sitting across from each other as the rain slanted across the window, and John had said, “You can stay as long as you like.” Tom had looked up in surprise, but John had kept his eyes obstinately on his cards as he went on, “With me, in London. You can stay as long as you like.”

In the years that followed, whenever he let his guard down, after a few pints or a long day’s work or a morning where the foul British weather threatened to suck the life out of him as he cycled to the Institute, Tom would think back on that offer, and inwardly curse whatever work-related stress had him answer, “I really need to get back to work, Blanky’s expecting me at the lab tomorrow morning.”

When they’d reached London, he’d gathered the cards and slipped them inside his satchel and it was only months later, when he exhumed the deck during a break with two postgrads at the lab, that he realised John had slipped the ace of spades back where it belonged.

The discovery was enough of a gut punch that he pulled the card straight back out of the deck and hid it inside an old geology textbook.

30.

“You never fight for yourself,” Johnny says, flinging the words like an accusation. “It’s like every time we went out with Roland the Artist, and you’d sit there and let him spin his pseudo-philosophical bullshit like it didn’t matter that he was doing it to put you down.”

“I don’t see what this has to do with Land,” Tom says, his even voice a counterpoint to Johnny’s righteous anger, as it has always been. 

On one occasion, Johnny had sprung up from his chair and Tom had thought he’d punch Land in the face, but instead he’d picked up his coat and left, Maya rushing off after him. Three or four years ago, Tom would have come up with a defence for Land, and for his attachment to him. When he’d started seeing Land, several months after he’d last seen John, he hadn’t been looking for a relationship, and if he had, he wouldn’t have thought it would come in such a form. And yet for all of Land’s authoritative opinions on art and politics and food and mainstream culture, they’d shared an interest in glaciers, and a desire to make people more receptive to climate change. Land had been relentlessly curious, in his day-to-day life as well as in bed. Tom had embraced his frankness. It had to mean something that Land had been immediately willing to introduce him to every last one of his many acquaintances. _My partner, the glaciologist._

“It didn’t occur to you to try and speak to him, did it?” Johnny says. 

“I assume you don’t mean Land. No, it didn’t. It was his choice. I had to respect it. I couldn’t force him to be with me, could I? I couldn’t force him to come out.”

“Being in love with someone doesn’t mean you have to respect everything they say and that you have to worship the ground they walk on. Sometimes, it means calling them out on their bullshit.”

“I’m not like that,” Tom reminds him. “You know I’m not like that.”

“Jesus. This story better have a happy ending. If it ends with him sobbing on you and going back to his wife…”

“We don’t have much time left, do we? What time did you say the professeur was picking you up? I’ll… go over the rest quickly.”

In fact, Tom has no idea what time it might be, but he also would rather not spend hours detailing the lonely weeks and months that followed John’s phone call, and the weeks and months after that, once he’d met Land. 

There’s little doubt that Johnny has seen straight through his bluff, but he doesn’t comment on it.

“Go ahead then,” he says.

31.

He first heard about Clare from Graham. After several months of Tom avoiding London, Graham appeared at the Scott Polar Research Institute and took him out to lunch. As Graham was the sort of affable and upbeat person that you couldn’t contradict without feeling like an absolute arsehole, Tom didn’t try to negotiate, even though he’d already agreed to eat a sandwich with the rest of the lab and he’d rather not have left in the middle of typing a cover letter for a grant with an impending deadline. Instead, he grabbed his jacket and told his colleagues they were free to help themselves to the crisps and crackers he’d brought for the shared meal.

“I must say I did not expect Irving to fall for someone like Clare,” Graham told him. “The two of them are so different. I don’t mean this as an insult, of course! She’s a marvelous woman and I wish them the best.”

They had gone over Tom’s recent research and Dr Reid’s death and had only just finished discussing Graham’s girlfriend, a rich dilettante who had studied English at Oxford and was now considering “a career in the arts”. When Tom had asked what sort of arts, precisely, Graham had answered, “Oh, sculpture, assemblage, but not so much Rauschenberg as Joseph Cornell, you know. She collects found objects, and whatever she can find in charity shops and in her parents’ house.” (A countryside villa, he explained, the garden of which had been “designed by William Kent”.) An American collector had bought several of her works and wanted to put together an exhibit for her at a gallery in New York. Judging from the amount of detail Graham went into, he must have thought this was a safer subject than his own work, which they generally avoided to talk about unless they’d had a few glasses of wine. From there, he’d moved on quite naturally and without any second thoughts to what he must have assumed was another safe subject: John’s new girlfriend, the star playwright.

“Actually, it was me who introduced them to each other. I took Irving to see one of her plays earlier this year, and she asked him out that very night - that wasn’t strange in itself, she’s a very spontaneous, very vivacious person, but I didn’t expect him to say yes. It took him a while, though. He turned her down two or three times. It had become a joke in our circle, and to Clare and Irving as well. I think she was as surprised as the rest of us when he agreed. To be honest, I was starting to think he’d decided he was better off on his own.”

“What are her plays about?” Tom asked, for lack of a better thing to say. 

“Well. The last one I saw was about Escher, I believe? And the one before that had something to do with Hieronymus Bosch. Her first one was about a painting… That famous painting by Van Eyck with the husband and wife.”

“I see,” Tom said, though he didn’t, really. 

Escher brought to his mind black and white prints of stairs that led to nowhere and Bosch’s name conjured up misshapen creatures with scrabbling feet and leathery wings and without having seen any of Clare’s plays, he assumed they must have been the cerebral sort: aesthetic puzzles, designed for an enlightened viewer. More than his ignorance, Tom felt the cultural distance that separated him from John, and from Graham, for that matter. He was reminded of how he’d dropped John off at an airport in Switzerland many years ago, and how John had had them detour by an art foundation to see an exhibit about a French artist called Vallotton who’d made a series of woodcuts of mountains in the late 19th century, and how John had seemed to enjoy talking about art, explaining to Tom how one went about making a woodcut, using a burin and chipping away at the areas that would be left white on the print, leaving in relief the areas that would be covered with ink - telling Tom how the crude shapes of woodcuts had appealed to German artists in the early 20th century, who wanted above all to express the immediacy and rawness of their emotions; showing him how Vallotton made use of the medium to illustrate contrasts of ice and rock, of the black crevasses and black sky and the immaculate snow, and then he’d steered Tom away from the mountains towards Vallotton’s prints of interiors and concerts and crowded streets. _The facelessness of the figures has something of Munch to it, but with less desperation. It’s intimate, don’t you think? The deep shadows in ink can suggest domesticity and the comfort of a private interior. Do you like it?_

 _Yes,_ Tom had said. _I like listening to you talking about it._

 _I like listening to you talking about ice,_ John had smiled.

Now Tom wondered whether John might not be more at ease with someone he could share a complex aesthetic conversation with.

“I met someone,” he said.

Graham’s face brightened.

“Did you? Who is he?”

“His name is Roland. He’s an artist.”

“Oh, wonderful! Tell you what, we should arrange to meet in London, the lot of us! You and Roland, Irving and Clare, Alison and me.”

“Sure.” 

Tom tried not to grimace at the thought. 

Thankfully, Graham’s idea would never come to pass, in part because Tom found excellent reasons to stay away from London in the following years, and when he did have to pass through, on his way to a conference or a meeting or to an airport, he made sure to be far too busy for a night out.

At first, he’d avoided any and all forms of contact with John, helped along by the fact that John did not use any social media. Late in the summer of 2015, Tom had spent four days alone in the Graian Alps and at the end of the first day, he’d texted John, the old routine of which mountain he intended to climb the next day, at what time and from which side. He’d refused to overthink it.

John had answered four hours later.

_Please stay safe, the weather doesn’t look ideal. Let me know when you’re back._

The speech bubble at the bottom of the screen remained active for a long time, but John didn’t add anything else.

At the end of the next day, Tom sent him the details of another walk. He spent a moment picking apart the way he felt, sitting in a crowded mountain hut where thinking meant ignoring a cacophony of French and Italian voices. The involuntary recrudescence of hope he tried to douse in fire, the hurt he skimmed over, knowing there was little to do about it, and he remained focused on the rest: how much John’s friendship had meant to him, how much it still meant.

This led him to two conclusions, the first being that for John’s benefit, he was ready to pretend that everything was back to the way it had been before; the second, that he was done lying to himself. For the first time, he let himself realise how much he’d wanted John - how much he’d wanted from John, with John - after which he resolutely shelved this emotional crisis in a corner of his mind, in a box labelled “Fragile: Handle with care.”

32.

The first time he saw John again was at New Year’s Eve, 2015, at a reunion of the hillwalking club organised by James and Dundy at James’ house. Tom spent most of the evening trying not to run into John and the one thing that he remembers with any clarity about that party is how Charlotte and Dundy had hooked up again, despite the fact that they’d both come along with a plus one.

The weather was rotten, he drank enough sake that he was hungover for most of January 1, and at some point, someone must have told him John had got engaged, because he does have a vague recollection of having stumbled back home with an arm slung over Edward’s shoulders, mumbling about how Edward had been right to break up with the guy he’d met in Alaska, because nothing lasted and the only thing they could do was to keep moving.

At which point he’d momentarily stepped away to throw up on the lawn outside King’s College. Arguably, and until he stepped into that crevasse on the Argentière glacier, this was the lowest he’d ever fallen.

33.

In those days it hadn’t been difficult to lose himself in his work: the end of his PhD was drawing near and it was becoming urgent for him to hand in some manner of a completed draft. 

The urgency was all his doing, for Blanky was not what one might deem “demanding”. His approach to deadlines was about as daring as his outlook on life. Tom had once seen him rewrite a five thousand word article over two pints in a crowded pub one night, two hours before the article was due, and after minimal corrections, the article in question won them a fully-funded research trip to Tromsø in Norway. This was in late 2017. Tom remembers this particular trip well among his various glacier-related journeys, because Edward came along - the both of them slightly under the weather at the time, Tom post-John Irving and, as it happened, post-Land, and Edward post-whatever was going on in his life that he didn’t wish to talk about. Blanky and Edward and Tom spent a few weeks quietly working together in the Arctic, seeing the new year come and go in a tiny meteorological station at the edge of a glacier, green lights brushing over the mountains like gauzy skirts.

Aside from the occasional solo hike, Tom wasn’t walking as much as he used to. At first, he’d been reluctant to find new hiking partners, as well as to commit to anything more than a day trip. Still, he would scale mountains for work, walking on ice to go drill the surface of a glacier, retrieving samples that they’d sometimes have to bring down on foot, pulling the cases behind them on makeshift sledges. The work was hard and could be discouraging, as they climbed up moraines that reached further up than he remembered, to find the edge of a glacier grey with dust and debris, knowing the ice would melt faster if the sun couldn’t reflect off the snow, or they’d be high up on a peak in Greenland and it would start to rain, and on one of those days, he saw Cassie Morton, the hotheaded glaciologist and helicopter pilot, turn to him with such anguish in her face that he almost had to look away. He knew what she was feeling - that she was picturing the water sliding down the glacier and accelerating its disappearance. 

“This should be snow, not rain”, she said, forcing the words out past the exhaustion of the climb. “This high up… Snow, not rain.” 

By then Tom had gone back to France and Astrid had taken him on a climb just to show him the sturdy little saplings growing where ice used to be. Plants and rain in what used to be the undisputed territory of ice and snow.

“It’s still beautiful,” Tom told Edward one night, drunkenly, as they sat together in a pub in Cambridge. “Maybe I love it more because I know it’s going to disappear.”

“You’re not usually so pessimistic”, Edward remarked.

“I can’t argue with the facts, can I?” Tom said.

“What’s got into you?”

In a rare display of authority, Edward confiscated his drink and ordered him some food.

“Get a grip,” he said. “As the saying goes, where there’s ice, there’s hope. Your glaciers aren’t dead yet. You aren’t dead. Eat some chips, for God's sake.”

34.

The wedding invitation had not been John’s idea.

“I’m _so_ sorry.” John sounded as frantic as Tom had ever heard him, which was to say: considerably drained, profoundly angry. As often, the anger was directed at himself first and foremost.

“It hasn’t arrived yet.”

If Tom himself didn’t sound in any way troubled, it was because the news hadn’t quite sunk in yet.

“Alright. Alright. I wanted to warn you before it did. Please feel free to… You can throw it away. You don’t have to open it - don’t feel obligated to… Don’t bother with the RSVP.”

“So you don’t want me there?”

“That’s not…” Tom could imagine John pacing around his living-room, dark brows knitted in frustration. “You _are_ welcome. Of course you’re welcome. I just don’t want you to think that I did this out of some… selfish desire to see you there, when I’m well aware that my behaviour towards you was unacceptable.”

“What behaviour are we talking about exactly?” Tom asked, still cautious to keep any inflexion out of his voice. “The way you ended our relationship, or the way you behaved before that? When you were sleeping with me. Engaging in… How would you call it? Illicit practices? Indecent behaviour.”

“Bitterness doesn’t suit you,” John said softly.

“I’m still trying to digest the fact that you… a collective “you”... sent me an invitation to your wedding,” Tom replied, equally gently.

“Clare… She thought she was doing the right thing. Edward told her about you and… She can be impulsive sometimes. I’ve talked to her since. This is all my fault for not… being more open to her in the first place. She took it in stride. Informed me that she used to date two of the friends that she’d invited, and since you were important to me, she would be happy to meet you.”

“You told her?”

“I didn’t want to lie. I’m so tired of lying.”

“She sounds like quite the character, your fiancée.”

“She is,” John said, though he didn’t sound particularly happy or proud. 

“Are we friends, then?” Tom asked.

“I’d understand if you no longer wanted to be my friend.” John’s tone had gone from dour to miserable. “I hardly deserve to be missing you, do I? But I do all the same. You were my closest friend for a long time and I screwed this up in half a dozen different ways. I don’t think there’s a day that goes by where I don’t... How… Are you alright? How are you, really?”

“Right now?” Tom said, with a strained laugh. “Of course I miss you, you bloody idiot.” It did not come out half as harsh as he’d meant it to.

John breathed out sharply. 

“I deserved that,” he said.

“We could…” Tom made himself go on before he could reconsider. “We could go for a walk, soon. If you can spare the time.” Before John could answer, he hurried to add, “Edward would come along.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s start with that. I’ll think about that wedding invite.”

“Tom, I don’t want you to feel under any obligation to...”

“I’ll think about it,” he repeated. “We’ve both moved on, haven’t we?”

Once he’d hung up, he remained standing in the middle of his room, fingers absently tapping against the back of his phone, trying to convince himself that there was some truth to what he’d just said.

35.

“Cornelius was at the wedding,” he informs Johnny.

Johnny laughs.

“Did Clare invite him as well?”

“Johnny.”

“No jokes about Clare. Noted. That was rude of me, sorry.”

“Nobody invited him,” Tom sighed. “He invited himself.”

36.

The wedding took place at one of the Registrar Offices in Edinburgh, in the summer of 2017. Light poured in from the tall windows and the floorboards shone and squeaked. The room had the sort of pomp that Tom had come to associate with the older colleges at Cambridge: wooden paneling and stuccoed cornices and an arched ceiling with gilded coffers, heavy metal chandeliers painted silver and gold and curved-back chairs. The upholstery was a sober navy blue. What modernity there was at the Registrar Office - the chandeliers, the furniture - was reluctant, streamlined, at once elegant and functional.

Though Tom had written weeks in advance to agree to the invitation, until the night before the wedding - Johnny’s suit freshly cleaned and pressed and hanging from his bedroom door - he wasn’t sure he would go. On the day, he snuck into the crowded room and stayed in the back, even though Graham had saved a chair for him at the front. Compared to the amount of money in the room, Johnny’s grey suit looked (was, undeniably,) cheap. And as Johnny was leaner than Tom, the suit pinched Tom’s upper arms and the pants felt tight around his thighs. He’d debated buying more expensive attire, and had then concluded that, as John knew him well, he’d be able to tell Tom had cleaned up, and maybe that would send the wrong message.

Not that he was given many occasions to interact with John that day, if any. In fact, he spoke more to Clare than he did to her new husband.

He’d seen pictures of her before, but they were a poor evocation of her liveliness and charm. Ideas came to her too fast to follow, and she’d rush this way and that as her theatre colleagues and her family and friends and John hurried in her wake. When Tom came face to face with her at the party after the ceremony, John’s stepsister Kate making the introductions, “And that’s John’s friend Thomas Hartnell, the glaciologist,” Kate’s hand settling on Tom’s arm and squeezing it, far too tightly, her clear green eyes communicating something else than a salute, an apology maybe - Clare smiled and embraced him and started talking about polar exploration and glaciology as if she’d never had any other interest in life, the vocabulary rolling off her tongue, pack ice and icebergs and ice shelves, and didn’t his job make him something of a historian, a historian of the ice, and it was impossible not to like her, to think anything else than that any man should be lucky to marry her.

Of course they would all have to go walking together someday, Clare told him, her smile swift. She was very much a city girl but she had a good pair of shoes and her dad used to take her, they’d climbed peaks in Switzerland. Tom had no trouble picturing it, the blue of the ice only a shade lighter than the blue of her eyes, a headband covering her ears, her blonde bob whipped by the wind as she planted her ski pole in a crack in the rock and pulled herself up onto a ledge.

“What do you think?” Kate asked him afterwards.

Clare had moved on to an elderly couple and was regaling them with some tale or other. There was a clear and daunting precision to the sweep of her arm and the motions of her raised hands. Tom knew nothing about fashion but to him she did look stylish, with her pale blue dress and her short hair. The right sort of companion for a Cambridge graduate, or for a financial analyst in the City, perhaps less so for the John Irving who wore jumpers with holes in them where they’d got caught on branches. The John Irving who was quite possibly gay.

“It was a beautiful ceremony,” Tom said.

At the buffet, Graham’s wife Alison had asked him if he’d been moved by the declaration, and Graham wanted to know what he thought of the poem John had chosen, and of the monologue Clare had performed for the crowd. Tom had said that the poem had been “amazing” and that the monologue had been “great”, which was another way of saying that he’d paid attention to neither, mostly because he’d been doing his best not to come apart at the seams of his ill-fitting suit. 

“I meant, what do you think of Clare,” Kate said, with enough softness that Tom knew she had at least some inkling of the weight of her question.

“She’s very spirited.” Unsure whether this was enough of a compliment, Tom quickly added, “she’s lovely.”

“I did try to talk to him, but you know how he is,” Kate said. “That’s a man who’d have been happy studying mathematics for a living and who’s been working at a bank for the past seven years. I think he’d made every decision in his life long before we met him, you and I, and there’s nothing we can do or say that will make him change his mind. I’m sorry.”

“I’m fine,” Tom told her, because it seemed pointless to pretend he didn’t know what she was talking about.

Kate raised her eyebrows at him and pushed a glass of wine into his hand.

“Did you come alone?” she asked.

“My boyfriend is at a gallery opening.”

Land would have ditched the opening if Tom had asked him to come, which Tom hadn’t. In fact, lately he’d been debating whether he should break up with him. Land had recently confessed to liking the gallery owner, which Tom was fairly sure had been an attempt at making him jealous, a game rather than a warning, but the ploy had had the reverse effect of making him realise he didn’t care in the least if Land decided to go sleep with someone else.

“I think I’ll head out,” Tom told Kate, setting the glass aside.

“It was lovely to see you again,” she said, with a sad sort of smile that he quickly shied away from.

After the ceremony, all the guests had piled into cars and journeyed to a large country estate belonging to a cousin of John’s, twice or thrice removed. There Tom wandered around wondering what ruinous instinct had motivated him to come, when he could have fled after the ceremony, when he should well have refused the invitation entirely. As they left the Registrar Office Graham had put an arm around his shoulders and stirred him towards Edward’s car and maybe that was the beginning and end of an explanation: Tom loved his friends too dearly to refuse them anything. 

Kate wasn’t the only one who gave him a piece of her mind that evening. On his way out of the house, as he tried to leave behind the sound of glasses and cutlery and overlapping voices coming from the living-room, and the small chaos of running children, forever underfoot in their rumpled Sunday wear, and the occasional familiar face of one of John’s brothers or of John’s father motioning to him for a hearty, false-sounding conversation that he couldn’t avoid without seeming rude, he came upon Edward.

He was smoking by the glass doors that led to the garden, looking deceptively at home among all the dated finery, with his sharp suit and his sharp nose and his jaded gaze, the downward curl of his lips. There was an open bottle on a silver tray at his side; he’d either lost his glass or decided he had no need for one.

“What are you thinking about?” Tom asked, as he came to join him.

“Murmansk,” Edward said, which was a very Edward thing to say, tired and non-committal and work-related. “That’s usually the one thing on my mind when I smoke. Do you want one?”

Tom nodded. Right then, it seemed a less dangerous option than the open bottle.

“Why Murmansk?”

For a time Edward didn’t answer, his eyes and hands focused on the cigarette he was rolling for Tom, his own cigarette balanced at the edge of the tray.

“Do you know they have nuclear-powered ice-breakers up there?” he said at last, gazing up at Tom as he put his filters away inside his jacket. “They turned one of them into a museum. It’s the main tourist attraction in town. A ship with mannequins in radiation suits. Tells you something about the ex-USSR, doesn’t it?”

“It tells me something about you, that you’re thinking about radiation suits at your best friend’s wedding,” Tom said, accepting a light. 

“I’m thinking that Irving is making a colossal mistake.”

Tom froze, his fingers tightening on the cigarette, all the more shocked as he’d been ready to slide into Edward’s random Arctic anecdotes as he would have into tranquil water, grateful for the embrace.

“And it’s not like I can say anything about it,” Edward went on. “It drives me up the walls.”

“She seems like a wonderful person,” Tom ventured. What he’d noticed, really, was that Clare was outgoing where Tom was quiet, small where he was tall, quick-witted and spontaneous where he was terrible at banter and always took his time to make up his mind. Not that it mattered, not that there was any comparison to make.

“Oh, I’m sure she’s great,” Edward said, taking another swig of the bottle. Even in the Arctic, with their expedition falling to pieces around them, Tom had not heard him sound like this - annoyance verging on anger, long-held frustrations coming to a boil. “He’s not marrying Clare, though, is he? He’s marrying his idea of conformity.”

“I’m sure that’s reductive, and even if it wasn’t… Maybe that’s what makes him happy.” 

Gently prying the bottle from Edward’s hand, Tom took a swig of wine. It must have been ridiculously expensive, and as such it was wasted on his ignorant palate, but he took another gulp for good measure.

“You’re right,” Edward sighed. “I’ve just… I’ve had trouble seeing past this idea that they’re both doing this for the wrong reasons. But maybe I’m being too cynical. Were you heading out?”

“Back to my hotel,” Tom said, with a short-lived smile. “I’ll call a cab.”

By then, Edward had returned to his usual, melancholic self: he apologised once again for his outburst, and before he headed back towards the festivities, he gave Tom’s shoulder a companionable slap.

“You look tired,” he smiled. “It’s about time we head north again, isn’t it? That trip to Tromsø will do us a world of good.”

“Any nuclear ships in Tromsø?”

“Not the kind I’m into,” Edward said, which could have been an attempt at a joke - with Edward, it was often difficult to tell.

The hardest part to explain about that night isn’t the fact that it was not a pleasant experience (Tom had never been under any illusion that it would be), or even the fact that he went, and stayed there for hours, when John would have readily forgiven him if he hadn’t showed up (he went because he did want to see John happy, though the glimpses he caught of him throughout the night and the brief conversations he’d had with Kate and Edward had left him unconvinced that he was). 

No, the most shameful aspect of that wedding was the moment when he stepped outside and ran into Cornelius Hickey, and instead of irritation or righteous fury or even plain indifference, Tom almost felt jubilant.

At last, someone with whom he wouldn’t have to be polite.

Wherever Cornelius had been earlier during the day, Tom hadn’t noticed him. It was possible that he’d only arrived for the buffet, skipping the ceremony entirely, which would have allowed him to blend in more easily. Still, it seemed utterly reckless of him to have come, considering how many guests at the party bore a grudge against him for some reason or other. 

When Tom spotted him, he was standing at the edge of the lawn, reddish-blond hair pulled into a short ponytail, his small figure unmistakable. Tom vaguely knew the tall, gaunt figure beside him, with his curly blond hair and his sloping shoulders. Billy Gibson from Cambridge, whose main claim to fame was not his rowing prowess, but the fact that he’d dated Cornelius on and off for several years, even after the extent of Cornelius’ academic fraud had come to light. John had mentioned that him and Billy sometimes went rowing together in London. Tom could only assume that this was how Billy had got himself invited, and how Cornelius had slunk in in turn, despite or because of the animosity that had always existed between him and John.

“Tom Hartnell!” Cornelius exclaimed, waving him over with a sly smile, his own personal brand of enthusiasm: eyes crinkling at the corners, his posture suddenly more relaxed and open, as if he had nothing to fear, nothing to hide. His cream-coloured suit could hardly have been more conspicuous. Beside him, Billy Gibson looked, more than ever, like a scarecrow that had been through one too many storms.

“I didn’t know you and John were on friendly terms,” Tom said.

Cornelius gave a subtle nod in Billy’s direction, and Billy obligingly took Cornelius’ full tumbler of whiskey and headed back towards the house.

“I didn’t know you were, either,” Cornelius said. “It’s nice to see he’s branching out.”

Tom kept his voice neutral.

“We were friends at Cambridge.”

“We were too. Friends, if that’s what you want to call it. Oh, I could tell you things about John Irving,” Cornelius smiled. “Stories you’d have a hard time believing.”

“I’m quite sure I don’t want to hear them.”

“Then why are you here? If not curiosity.”

“I was heading back,” Tom said, nodding towards the nearby road. “I see you and Billy are still going strong?”

Cornelius’ easy smile froze on his face. Though it didn’t last long, it told Tom what he needed to know: that whatever game Cornelius was playing, it wasn’t going according to plan. Throughout the years, Tom had observed several Cornelius-related dramas from afar, with a mixture of horror and fascination. There’d been the time he’d stolen Crozier’s research, and used it to make himself a name even as he led a smear campaign behind the scenes, spreading stories about Crozier’s alcoholism. Or there’d been the time he’d roped Magnus into following him halfway across the world and had then scampered off with his credit card and visa, leaving him stranded in Canada. And every once in a while, Tom would hear from someone or other that Cornelius had returned to Billy and won him back, and from then on it became a countdown towards the day when Cornelius grew bored of Billy again and took off once more.

Tom had long since assumed, based on Cornelius’ track record at university, that he would forever bounce back and ensnare new people. But that implied meeting new people. Billy aside, there was only so much the Cambridge crowd would put up with, and even outside Cambridge, academia was a small world. Cornelius’ presence at John’s wedding was a clear sign that he was incapable of stepping away from the ground that he’d already scorched.

“Tell me the truth, before you leave,” Cornelius smiled. “Have you come here for the same reason I did? To get a glimpse of what life would look like, if you’d stayed as deeply entrenched in the closet as our mutual friend?”

Tom shook his head in weary resignation.

“Leave him be. Today of all days, I really don’t think he’ll care what you think of him.”

“I beg to differ.” Cornelius’ amicable tone warned Tom ahead of time that he was about to say something cruel. “I doubt he’s forgotten those boat club parties, and how… malleable he became, after a drink or two. Of all the men I’ve been with, I don’t think I’ve ever met another one who tried to blame a handjob on a non-alcoholic beer.”

“Is that what this is about?” Though Tom’s voice remained quiet, there was an unusual viciousness to his tone. “Cornelius, that was ten years ago. Don’t you think it’s about time you moved on? And I don’t just mean from John. We’re not students anymore. The world is wider than the college and the boat house and Crozier’s office. Maybe you’re the one who should consider branching out.”

Cornelius hadn’t said a thing and it had occurred to Tom that he might have been used to being picked on, and regardless of how truthful his words had been, for a brief moment he’d regretted them. He’d walked off to wait for his cab by the side of the road, and Cornelius had come to join him there, a few minutes later.

“Cigarette?” he said, like it might qualify as a peace offering. “I saw you with Little, earlier... Players Gold Leaf, yeah?”

Tom gave him a questioning look.

“His tobacco,” Cornelius said, lifting his own pack which was indeed the same brand as Edward’s. “I bet it hasn’t changed in ten years. Do you know where he picked that up? Who he picked it up from. And you say I’m the one clinging to the past. Can’t say I blame him, though. Solomon was a really good shag.”

“I’d forgotten how much poison you could pour into a two minute conversation.” Tom signalled to the cab with some relief. “You should quit smoking. And you should think of getting home too. I really don’t think there’s anything for you here, if all you want is to pick at old scabs.” He opened the door of the cab and turned back to add, “I don’t think there’d be anything for you here even if you wanted to make amends.”

“Split a cab?”

Tom glared at him.

“Well, it was nice seeing you,” Cornelius shrugged. “After all this time. I don’t know if anyone’s told you, but you look absolutely terrible. You should…”

The rest of his advice went unheard over the sound of the door slamming shut. Tom breathed out in relief as the cab drove off and into the dark countryside, leaving the bright country house and the wedding and Cornelius’ pale silhouette behind.

37.

About six months before Tom fell into the crevasse on the Glacier du milieu, he met with Clare at a trendy little cafe in Kensington. John and Clare had moved to the area after John had inherited a flat from a deceased relative, some uncle or great-uncle he hadn’t known very well. Tom hadn’t seen the new flat, and until that conversation, the most he’d seen of Clare was the occasional glimpse he caught in between doors, apartment doors and front doors and car doors whenever he met up with John for a trip. Clare would offer him tea or coffee and nine times out of ten he’d decline, and the tenth he’d agree to stay twenty minutes and spend them trying to be happy for John while feeling sorry for himself.

This time around, John and him had been scheduled to leave late on a Friday afternoon so they might make the most of the following day walking in the Peak District. Clare had written to Tom - in an email sent to his university address - to know if he would kindly meet her at a cafe close to the flat, two hours before he was due to meet John.

They had barely sat down with their drinks when she said, “Let’s talk about why I asked you to meet me, shall we?”

Reluctant as Tom was to hear what she had to say, he was also grateful that she’d decided to come out with it rather than to beat around the bush. 

“I’m listening.”

“You always look so calm. Every time I see you, and in every picture I’ve ever seen of you, and in John’s drawings… You never raise your voice, do you? Do you ever get angry?”

“Of course,” Tom said, wondering where this conversation was going. Though he was on his guard, as of yet he wasn’t sure why.

“At John?”

When Tom didn’t answer, Clare made a small sound of exasperation, tapping her pale green nails against her mug of coffee. 

“Would you like to know how much I misunderstood the situation?” she asked.

_(Woah woah woah. You need to slow down, I feel like I’m missing something here. How did we go from the wedding - to this?)_

_(The professeur will be here any minute now and nothing really happened during the two years I skipped. It was only John and me walking together. More of the same. Or… You know what I mean. Like it was before we... There’s not much to tell.)_

_(You’ve always been such a lousy liar. It’s almost sad because you try your best to lie properly, and it makes it even less convincing than if you’d half-arsed it. I’m sure the truth is painful and shameful as hell. Give me the truth.)_

38.

He did raise his voice sometimes, he did so on one of the first walks they took after the wedding, in the winter that followed, late 2017 or early 2018, when John slipped on a wet slab of dark brown rock and fell off the path and into the fog. Tom screamed so loud his voice broke on John’s name, and he screamed again, two or three or four times until finally John’s voice rose back out of the empty landscape. _I’m okay. I’m fine._

Tom had to scramble down the side of the path to get to him, a sheer drop at his back, and he kept a close eye on John all the way down the mountain, stepping in whenever he saw him stumble on weary legs. When they got back to the car, John changed out of his mud-soaked jumper and t-shirt, with a new bruise on the back of his shoulder the size of Tom’s fist, and he didn’t move away when Tom briefly leaned his forehead against the back of his neck and breathed him in, and breathed out the fright of the fall, knuckles softly stroking down the length of John’s back.

Even as early as those first walks after the wedding, Tom was more than aware that if John had initiated anything, he’d have followed his lead in this respect as well, no questions asked, whether it meant kissing him or going to bed with him. He was confident that John would never make a move on him, but it had become surprisingly difficult to stop wanting John on account of him acting in an aloof manner. As far as Tom could see, the only way of dealing with it, short of cutting John out of his life, which he couldn’t bring himself to do, was to wait for it to pass, as he knew it must, eventually. He would have preferred for it to happen faster, of course. At times, the longing verged on being unbearable. 

It didn’t help that he could tell that John still wanted him - all the signs that he’d interpreted as disgust before he could now read for what they were, fear and desire intermingled, John’s restraint warring with all the habits that they’d acquired, physical memories of an easiness of movement between them that it would have been so easy to return to - and he’d catch John looking at him and quickly looking away once he found out he’d been caught, his face flushing; he’d catch him on the verge of reaching out and holding himself back, he’d catch him doing so at night after he’d let himself move closer in sleep, and Tom waited for himself to get better, to get over John and his heterosexual life choices and his repressed feelings, and he’d go on a date with a friend of a friend in Cambridge and have a good time, and then he’d spend a day rock climbing with John, have a couple drinks at a pub and while John was in the bathroom he’d remind himself for the hundredth time that they’d been friends before and that their relationship needn’t be sexual, needn’t even involve physical closeness, until John returned to their booth nervous and bright-eyed, and it took all of Tom’s self-control not to haul him up and out to where he might touch him away from the bartender’s sullen gaze. And he’d come home and ask the friend of a friend to meet him for coffee and spend a torturous five minutes trying to explain that his work was his life and he really wasn’t ready to date anyone. 

“This doesn’t have to be complicated”, the guy (Edmund) said. “We can take it slow, see if it goes anywhere, no pressure if it doesn’t. I really like you.” 

To which Tom replied, “I’m not ready for a casual relationship either.” 

“You’ll forgive me if I give in to the obvious glacier analogy here,” said Edmund, who was a Cambridge academic and therefore contractually obliged to speak in literary code. “I hope for your sake that someone can melt down the ice someday, find the Tom Hartnell who’s trapped underneath.” 

“I’m not sure what an analogy is, but I don’t think that’s a very good one,” Tom noted, his eyes on Edmund’s slender, fidgety hands as they tore apart a sugar packet, and then spun a spoon around a cup of black coffee where he’d poured no sugar at all. “Of course melting is not an abnormal phenomenon for a glacier, but you’d want it to happen within…”

“Tom. Please don’t lecture me about glaciers.”

“There’s this old friend,” Tom said, cautiously. “I’m not… It’s complicated.”

Edmund watched him in silence for a moment, spoon and cup and sugar spill momentarily forgotten.

“Let me teach you what an analogy is.” (This conversation had gone a long way to remind Tom of why he didn’t date Cambridge scholars.) “You’re the glacier, and that guy’s global warming. I hope that helps you make sense of things.”

Sometime around then, he did try to talk about it to someone. 

The logical choice was Edward, who in spite of his existential dread and melancholic disposition remained patient and forever measured in his approach to his work and his friends and, possibly, his relationships.

By that point Edward had started seeing another one of Crozier’s protégés, Thomas Jopson, an art historian in his late twenties whom Tom had met back when he’d first started frequenting the Polar Club, and whom he mostly remembered as being kind and diligent. (“Crozier’s lackey,” Cornelius used to say. Unfortunately, Cornelius’ cruel nicknames had a tendency to stick.)

“That’ll be weird,” Edward had noted wryly, “Thomas and Thomas.”

“He’s much better looking than me,” Tom pointed out. “I don’t think there’ll ever be any confusion who you’re talking about. I’m really happy for you, in any case. You and other Thomas. You’re a great guy, he’s a great guy, it’s a match made in Heaven.”

“He’s very handsome, isn’t he?” Edward mumbled around his cigarette, hands fumbling with a lighter that wouldn’t cooperate. “Not that it matters, of course…”

“Of course,” Tom agreed. “You noticed his good character first. It wasn’t his smile, or his blue eyes, or that thing he does…” He tucked an imaginary strand of hair behind his ear.

“You’ve been paying some attention to Jopson, I see.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Edward. You can’t call your boyfriend by his last name.”

“I’m not sure that we’re… It’s early.”

“That’s Thomas Jopson we’re talking about. I don’t think he does casual.” He glanced at Edward. “Do you?”

Edward shook his head. “Not with him. But he was… I don’t know if you remember. He was supposed to be part of our expedition, back in the day. And when the funding got cut, I threw him out. Well, it was Dundy and me… But it doesn’t matter, I had a hand in that decision. I’m trying to build something on a betrayal…”

Tom seized the lighter and lit Edward’s cigarette for him.

“We’re not students anymore. That was a long time ago, and if Thomas was still angry about it, he wouldn’t be dating you.”

“What about you?” Edward asked. “Has there been anyone since Roland the Artist?”

Tom winced. 

“Don’t call him that. And no. Not really. Graham tried to set me up again a few weeks ago, but I think I’ll take a break from that for a while. My head’s not in it.”

“It’s not supposed to be about your head, is it?”

Now was as good a time as ever, Tom decided.

“Have you ever… wanted someone you couldn’t have?”

“Yeah,” Edward said. “I used to have a vastly unrequited crush on Irving, a long time ago. You can laugh about it, if you like. Of all the people to fall for - the one man who’d see it as a personal slight. What about you? Who was it… Who is it?”

Tom forced himself to smile.

“No one important. Some… Some guy I met at a conference. It’s just… It makes me wonder. Maybe I’m better off not… I don’t know why I brought this up. Tell me about your trip to the Arctic. How is that coming about?”

Edward gave him a long, silent look, dark brows furrowed, but in the end he didn’t press the matter.

“Quite well,” he said. “We’re going to be based in this tiny little research station with only one Russian scientist, a woman. Both the scientist and the station have been up there since long before the dissolution of the USSR. It’ll be like I’m travelling back in time to some pre-Chernobyl era. I’m looking forward to it.”

“Of course you are,” Tom snorted, and took the cigarette from Edward’s fingers to take a quick, nervous drag.

They wouldn’t have resumed their solo outings as quickly as they did if Graham hadn’t rather improbably caught the flu late in the summer of 2017, on the eve of a walk that the three of them had been planning to take along the Welsh coast. It couldn’t have been more than three or four weeks after John’s wedding.

 _Do you still want to do this?_ Tom had texted John.

 _Yes_ , John had answered, a few seconds later.

In two years, Tom can only remember two separate occurrences of him and John talking things out; if that was indeed the right way to describe those tense, aborted exchanges.

There was a conversation at the edge of a forest, while they waited for the rain to quiet down so they might walk on towards the car park. At first they’d thought they’d make a run for it, across the field and down towards the ruin of a little farm to find some shelter under its blackened eaves, but the rain intensified seconds before they were to leave the cover of the trees, from a hushed patter to a wild and enthusiastic downpour.

John held Tom back with an arm across his middle.

“Not worth it.”

Tom took an obedient step back. After a minute and as the rain kept battering the field, he swung his backpack down onto the mossy ground. It had been a good walk and he could still feel it in his legs, like some instinct to push on. They’d kept a mad pace throughout, which had left little space or breath for talking, though they had discussed Tom’s recent trip to Antarctica in the car, what he’d described as “the grounding of our satellite data,” whereby they’d gathered samples and radar measurements that would be checked against satellite imagery. 

_“And the conclusions?”_ John had asked. 

_“In progress,”_ Tom had answered. _“But the warm ocean water is nibbling on the ice shelves and they’ve been getting thinner. The melting of the ice shelf itself won’t raise the level of the sea, since the ice shelf is already floating, but… I’m sorry. You didn’t ask for…”_

_“Go on.”_

_“Well, if the ice shelf comes apart, it stops acting as a buffer between the sea and the inland glaciers. And then the inland glaciers melt faster, and they’ll cause the level of the sea to rise. So the team I was with, we’ve been drilling holes in Thwaites Glacier, which is part of the shelf, to get to the seawater below it…”_

“Do you regret having to come back each time, or is it the back and forth that you enjoy?” John asked him now, picking up the conversation where they’d left it in the car. “The changes of scenery, the never staying put.”

“I used to look forward to coming back. Back when I was coming back to you, remember?”

Tom was hardly an impulsive person. His answer had stemmed from years of mulling over the painful fall-out of their relationship, rather than from a sudden desire to swing blindly at John. Yet no sooner had he spoken that he began to have second thoughts. 

John looked as if he’d been slapped.

“I still… I write down the dates. Of your comings and goings,” he said. With his eyes to the ground, Tom could see him worrying the muddy undergrowth with a scuffed boot. “I’ll stop if you ask me to. I like to know where you are. I know I should be making more of an effort to… To follow the path I’ve chosen, and I have been praying for guidance...”

“You have been praying,” Tom repeated.

“I know you don’t believe in, well, in anything, really…”

“I never said that. I believe there could be a God. Or several. And I’m sure praying can be a form of… Of self-reflection. But I wouldn’t take advice from any kind of institutionalised religion. At the risk of sounding like… Like a scientist, most religions don’t deal in facts and they’re hardly adaptational. But I have been… Moved, spiritually. There is a religion of mountains too, isn’t it?” He gave John a rueful smile. “... Or is that blasphemy?”

“It is,” John said, his face characteristically stern. “But I know what you mean. I used to…” He sighed. “This might sound ridiculous to you. Yet I don’t know how else to say it. My life used to be centred around rowing and religion. Ever since I… Ever since school. I started rowing when I was twelve, and my mother took me to church earlier than that. I must have been about six or seven. And it felt so… So satisfying to have those two things to hold onto. Stabilising influences, or… Or objects of devotion... Causes I could dedicate my life to. And after university, this came to take the place of… of rowing. These walks.” He was looking out at the drenched field rather than at Tom. “May I go on?”

“You may,” Tom said, wary of even saying this much, for fear that John should change his mind and bring these confessions to an abrupt halt.

“When I was… fourteen, or maybe fifteen, I talked Little into… going to the chaplain at our school, to ask him about homosexuality. Father Andrew was always so… Friendly. I wanted to trust him. He was always harping on about how religion was the framework of your life, but the rest was what you made it. It sounded... comforting, I suppose. I wasn’t looking for any kind of radical thinking, but if he’d been too conservative, it’d have put me off as well... I missed home at the time, I missed the church at home. Morning worship at St Andrew’s and St George’s on Sundays, and the full roast afterward that could last long into the afternoon. I had no idea what to do with the fact that I’d been kissing boys and Little and I had vastly differing views on the subject. This chaplain was always trying to get us to talk to him, and I figured this time around, we had a legitimate question to ask.” 

The rain was not falling as violently as it had minutes before, but neither of them felt the need to point that out. Tom sat upon a large boulder, extending legs that had gone numb from standing too long in the damp and cold. John remained where he was, upright and clutching the strap of his backpack. Tom knew that backpack well. John used to store his rowing kit inside it. His club had never agreed to order its own club-specific backpacks so John had sewn the coat of arms of his college onto it. _Quite badly,_ he’d admitted, at the end of recounting that story, up on a hilltop somewhere as the two of them took their lunch out of their bags. _But I’m very fond of that backpack. I like taking care of my things so they’ll last a very long time. I prefer that to blind consumption._ Tom had pretended to be hunting for his knife, which had allowed him to hide his smile of amusement inside his bag.

“Father Andrew gave us the usual talk: this is an all boys’ school, which can lead to some confusion for boys at this crucial, turning point in their lives. It isn’t unusual to experiment at this time and university would… clear our heads of the fog of homosexual desire, which wasn’t desire at all, or rather what it was was desire misdirected, searching for an outlet at all costs. Little said something to the effect of... ‘With all due respect, sir, isn’t there a possibility that this inclination might be permanent?’” John wasn’t a born storyteller, but he knew Edward very well and could do a credible impression of his tone, deference underlain with the confidence of his upbringing, so that even as he asked a question, you could tell he thought he knew the answer. “I was just looking away,” John went on, “pretending that it wasn’t me we’d come here for... From the start, I’d been adamant that this was… Little’s issue. That I was trying to help him out. Save his soul, something like that.” He shook his head. “And I don’t think I ever apologised to him for that, not in any way that would matter.”

“We both know Edward loves you,” Tom said. “And I don’t think he ever held your religious beliefs against you.”

“No, he is rather of the patient and long-suffering sort, isn’t he?” John had fisted his hands inside his pockets and it was all Tom could do not to reach out and touch his arm. It used to be that it would have reminded John to breathe out some of the strain that made it look as if his spine was about to snap in two, but Tom couldn’t be sure, after all that had happened, that any contact on his part wouldn’t wind him up even more tightly than he already was.

“Father Andrew didn’t lose his composure. Throughout that entire conversation he remained… almost enthusiastic? Glaringly upbeat. He presented it as a choice... I’m sure he thought that this was clever of him, progressive even. Gathering the lost sheep back to the flock by preying on our feelings of inadequacy; that teenage desire to please the adults who treat you like adults. ‘God won’t strike you down if you turn away from him’, he said. ‘He’ll be displeased but not angry. Imagine that he is a disappointed parent. You may yet earn his forgiveness; you can choose to return to the Lord’s pastures. And if this… inclination… is as deep-rooted as you say it is, Mr Little, it’ll be a choice you have to make every day. A fight of every instant to live according to the precepts of the Church. I know that what I’m asking of you is daunting...’ I wish I could transport you there, it wasn’t merely his words that made an impact but the whole setting. They’d given him an office but he preferred to receive us in a little room behind the sacristy, with wood panels all over the walls and a carpet that must have been there before the Reformation. It was properly claustrophobic and there weren’t any chairs, only a few old kneelers. And the picture wouldn’t be complete without Father Andrew himself… He seemed ageless to us, but he couldn’t have been very old. He wore those little round glasses... He had no chin to speak of. A scrawny neck and bony hands; he always gripped our shoulders too hard. What I remember the most is how difficult it was to hold his gaze. He had that transfixed stare of men who think they’ve seen God.” John huffed. “I must have looked the same when I was younger. I’d have made a fine monk in another life. A fine soldier. I wanted to prove myself… I wanted to be given insurmountable tasks. I was ready to swallow down all this talk of… of us being bright young men, with a promising future ahead of us, and that was why he could talk to us, because we could shoulder the burden of truth.”

“What did Edward make of all that?”

John had a wistful smile.

“Little was very good at nodding and keeping his head down. They did catch him once or twice, and he got punished for it. It played some part in convincing me that the chaplain was right, seeing Edward limp because some old bastard had caned him so hard he couldn’t walk properly. I was… I know it’s no excuse. But I was young and far from home and I wanted to make my father proud. My father in Edinburgh, to whom I sent those letters full of ellipses, designed to make him think I was sticking to the straight and narrow... A model boy. And my other father,” John’s voice became brittle with self-deprecation, “He of the stained glass windows and the drowsy smell of the chapel when I knelt down to pray in the mornings. I’m part of a Church that believes one doesn’t need any intermediaries to enter into a conversation with God, but if you’re fourteen and trying to talk to God, what you’ll get in return is a lot of self-doubt and no clear idea of what it means to be good. So if the chaplain told me I could enter into a daily fight against my worst instincts in order to win eternal salvation... It was a belief system I could adhere to. I used to believe that. I’ve believed that my whole life.”

“You used to?” Tom ventured.

“Father Andrew wasn’t entirely wrong. You can choose to be miserable in the name of God. Generations have done it. And it did make me miserable. It did… It does. And the irony lies in the fact that… The Church of Scotland stands against homophobia. I wasn’t so much fighting a losing battle as I was fighting some imaginary foe. And having to look back on almost two decades of struggles and tell myself I’ve been doing this for nothing, and hurting people I cared about, you and Clare and Little and… And essentially torturing myself for no valid reason except some... Some craven inability to cope with my own desires, my own body’s response to men. It was a stupid choice to begin with, but it’s become the only choice I can live with, because the alternative is that I did all of this for nothing. That I got married as an act of self-sabotage. I can’t reconcile that - I can’t… I can’t…”

Tom did touch him then, with a hand between John’s shoulder blades, and he felt John shudder, though he quickly grasped Tom’s arm and held fast to it, as if he was afraid that Tom might regret his gesture and move away.

“You deserved far better than what I put you through.”

“Well, it was a choice I made as well,” Tom answered quietly. “Something slightly maddening with you, rather than something saner with someone I liked less.”

“Oh, you liked me?”

Tom couldn’t have said if John was trying to lighten the mood or if he meant to extract some unspoken truth out of him.

“Quite,” he said, trying for a smile. “I quite liked you. I quite… like you. But unlike you, I don’t really try to fight the things that I can’t change.” He let his hand drop from John’s back. “I think it’s as good as it’s going to get… The rain, I mean. Should we go on?”

John blinked and straightened up.

“Yes. Yes, of course. Sorry. Let’s walk on.”

Tom let him take the lead and for the duration of the walk to the farm under a thin drizzle, he tried to think of something to say that would let John know that he was grateful for the talk, belated as it may have been. It was the first time he’d ever heard John speak so much, the words tumbling out like an avalanche, uprooting his usual defences along the way, burying his reserve and reluctance under several layers of fresh longing and grief. Thank you fell short of expressing what Tom felt, for of course it wasn’t as simple as gratitude, but it was the best he’d come up with by the time they reached the ruin and John turned around to face him, dark hair plastered to his forehead by the rain, blue eyes slightly wild still, that full mouth as desirable as it had always been.

“You’d started to talk about a research station, earlier. In Antarctica. You said it was at a risk of falling into the sea? And then we… Started talking about something else. Would you tell me more about that?”

Tom gave himself a handful of seconds to look back towards the line of rain-blackened firs so John wouldn’t see the disappointed slant of his mouth.

Once he was certain his voice wouldn’t betray him, he started to talk.

“The current station is actually the sixth we’ve built. Starting in the 1950s. The previous versions got crushed or buried in snow. This one has giant hydraulic legs at the base, so we can move it back along the ice shelf if we think it’s at risk…”

After that, it must have been almost a year before either of them dared to bring up the subject again.

They’d spent the day rock climbing and had retreated to a hostel for the night. The place was almost deserted, apart from a group of college students on a break, three girls and a boy who’d appropriated a low table on one side of the common room where they loudly went through the entire collection of board games at their disposal. Tom and John agreed to a game of Clue and lost to one of the girls, after which they accepted a round of drinks from the boy, to “sweeten your defeat, yeah?” The students all came from Manchester where they were doing Masters in English lit. Tom watched John engage in a quick back-and-forth with the most assertive of the girls about whether or not there was such a thing as “Scottish literature” (in John’s opinion, there was; in the girl’s, national identity was “nothing more than a 19th century construct and Scottish literature has about as much legitimity as tartan and the kilt and Ossian’s myths when it comes to representing a cohesive identity grounded in historical fact”). The first round of drinks became a second, then a third, which John insisted on paying when it became clear that the students would have the drinks whether they joined in or not. Once she’d closed the kitchen, the cook brought them mugs of mulled wine.

There were two large dormitories in the hostel and the cheerful teenager in charge of the front desk had agreed to let the two groups stay separately. The room that Tom shared with John was filled with about twenty bunk beds that made up a forest of metallic frames, equipped with thin polyester-covered mattresses and pillows. 

It had been a long time since they’d slept alone in the same room, and while it would have taken more than three pints and a mug of mulled wine for Tom to get properly drunk, he did feel traitorously tipsy, and therefore quite careless, as they unfolded the cheap bed sheets the hostel had made available for them and unrolled their sleeping bags to use as blankets. They’d chosen two bottom bunks side by side. There wasn’t much in the way of a window and the carpet with its purple and grey stripes was patterned with unidentifiable stains.

“Good night then,” Tom said, as he returned from the showers and John gathered his things to go take his turn. “They’re still messing around in the other room, I think you should have the bathroom to yourself.”

“Oh, wonderful,” John murmured, and hurried off. His years of public school had left him with a passionate hatred of shared bathrooms ( _The point was to fortify your spirit by having you compare yourself to the others constantly,_ he’d told Tom, _which mostly led the biggest, most insecure boys to pick on those who hadn’t finished growing up, and that included me for a little while…_ ).

By the time John came back, Tom was almost asleep. If his phone hadn’t lit up to remind him that he was almost out of battery, he’d have drifted off and never heard John’s tenuous whisper, a few minutes later. 

“I look forward to these moments all year. What does that say about me?”

“Hm.” Tom turned around to face him, although there wasn’t much to see by the light of the emergency exit. “That you shouldn’t be living in London?”

“Yeah.” John had a humourless laugh. “Yeah, you’re probably right. I’ll move back to Scotland someday, I hope.”

The group of students made their way down the hall from the bathroom, merrily talking over one another. John kept quiet until they’d gone by.

“Doesn’t that remind you of the hillwalking club?”

“Yeah,” Tom huffed. “Yeah it does, a bit.”

“I remember you back then. I used to be so jealous of you…”

“You? You were jealous of me?”

“You were always at ease with everyone! You were very good at making friends. I did want to… I wanted us to talk, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it. I thought for sure I’d bore you to death.”

“I think we’d have got along back then, too. If we had just accepted that what we wanted was to walk together in silence and let the others chat up ahead.”

“Or far behind,” John remarked. “Far behind would be more accurate.”

Tom laughed, and although he couldn’t see John, he could have pinpointed the exact moment something changed, as if the air between them had taken on a new quality, charged with something he was reluctant to name.

“I don’t think I’d heard you laugh in years,” John said, with a kind of caution that Tom well recognised, because it was the very same he used whenever he thought his words might scare John away.

“No, I don’t think you would have.”

“How do you need me to be?” John asked, still in that same hushed voice. “Isn’t it better if I pretend nothing ever… Isn’t it better if I…”

“I don’t want you to pretend. Not with me. It used to be that we could be ourselves with each other… And I want that back.”

“We won’t be able to keep doing this… these walks, if I stop pretending.”

“Then maybe we shouldn’t be hiking together anymore.”

John was silent for so long Tom thought he’d fallen asleep. He was trying to decide whether he wanted him to be, and for his last words to have gone unheard, when John spoke up once again.

“Come over here, would you?”

It was only then that Tom measured how much he’d been lying to himself - as he understood that, even while he’d been telling himself that John would never behave in any way that might be deemed inappropriate, he’d been waiting for him to give in, and perhaps had known that he eventually would.

John pushed himself against the wall to allow Tom to get in the bed beside him, pulling the sleeping bag over them both.

“Well,” John murmured. “Here we are. Sometimes I think that this… This is what I’ve always been, stripped of my pretences... A drunken fool. I’m not sure I can do this anymore. Not… not this I mean,” he rushed to say. “This has always been the one thing that I… The one thing that felt right. But I can’t expect you to wait for me while I figure myself out. Nobody’s worth that kind of patience, let alone me. You should move on. You have my blessing to move on.”

“And you say this now,” Tom murmured, as he took a hold of John’s knee to pull him closer and fit their bodies together, draping an arm over John’s side, surprised by fast it all returned to him, the smell of John’s shampoo, because he kept carrying around shampoo even on those outings that required they lighten the load in order to quicken their step - the softness of John’s hair where it brushed against his nose, the relief of being once again tangled up in a too small-bed, legs drawn up, John breathing slightly too fast against his neck.

_(The truth is that nothing happened. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t… We don’t have to go into detail about everything, do we?)_

He’d always held onto this one certainty, that in spite of all they’d been through, and all of what they’d inflicted upon themselves, at least the two of them were good people, trying their hardest to do the right thing, elusive as it may be.

That night however, as he gripped John’s hair and wrenched a kiss from him, pressing him back into the thin mattress and swallowing his gasp of surprise, he found out that the line was a fine one and had always been, and as good as he used to think he was, he’d been dancing on the edge of life-shattering wrongs, much like everybody else. He might never have stolen a bicycle or committed academic fraud and he might never have lost his wits in the endless Arctic daylight, but if John hadn’t held him back that night, one hand fisted in Tom’s hair as he fumbled his way out of the bed, Tom would have gone on ignoring every last instinct that told him that this was a bad idea, in favour of what would undoubtedly have been a very uncomfortable shag in a tiny, creaking bed.

“I don’t know what makes it worse,” John said. He sounded badly shaken. “That this… That this is all on me, that I feel… responsible, for pushing you into a corner. Or that it makes it even harder to turn you down. I’ve never… I’ll take your bed. I’ll just… It’s fine. I’ll sleep over there.”

Tom heard him stumbling over his backpack in the dark.

“John, I’m sorry…”

He didn’t mean it, and John must have known, because he had a brief, panicked laugh.

“I should be thankful that you’re rarely upfront about what you want. Thankful, or regretful? Heaven’s sake. We’re both drunk. Let’s just… Let’s get some sleep, alright?”

“Alright.”

“Tom… I’ve no right to ask this of you, but if you could give me some time to…”

John’s voice trailed off.

“Some time to?” Tom repeated, but John didn’t go on.

Tom hardly got any rest that night. It didn’t help that the sleeping bag smelled like John, that the flat hostel pillow was draped in that thick woollen jumper that Tom well recognised for having pulled it over John’s head so many times. 

As for John, he remained silent and motionless, but Tom was never under any illusion that he’d fallen asleep, and in the morning they stumbled out of the hut and towards the mountain, and the both of them tried to make the most of their day, despite their respective hangovers.

This was the last time he saw John ahead of Clare’s request that they meet. In fact, it was the last time he saw John until he woke up in a French hospital and found him at his bedside.

39.

“Would you like to know how much I misunderstood the situation?” Clare asked. “I told him I didn’t mind, if what he wanted was some sort of open marriage. I could be open to that. I could be open to him seeing men if he felt the need for that.” She let out a frustrated breath. “But John’s the monogamous type, isn’t he? He was before I met him. I thought at first that with some time he might come to be less strict about his… religious doctrine. He didn’t insist on a religious marriage. He doesn’t talk about it. But it’s a more insidious influence, isn’t it? It’s this culture of guilt. He’s attracted to men and he feels guilty about it. He married me even though he wasn’t over you and he feels guilty about that, guilty towards me and towards you, because it’s impossible for him to conceive of loving two people at once and somehow, marrying me didn’t magically cure him of his desire for you. And I might be the stupidest of us all, because I really did walk into it thinking I wanted a challenge, and a good-looking, troubled boy was exactly what I needed in my life. I appreciate that you’re listening to me air all of this, Tom, because it’s not exactly the kind of talk I can have with my friends over beers and a bowl of crisps - I’m not really ready to admit to them that they might have been right about this wedding being a mistake. I have one question for you though, and I’d appreciate it if you were honest. When you guys go on those hiking trips, is that really all that you do? You hike?”

“Yes,” Tom replied. There was no other answer he knew how to give. _A mistake,_ she’d said, and it was a struggle to focus on any other part of her speech.

Clare’s grip on her napkin was white-knuckled.

“Maybe it would be easier if you were sleeping with him. As it is, what am I supposed to blame him for? Pining for you? That was already the case when I proposed to him, and it’s not like I hadn’t guessed. I flipped through one of those sketchbooks and I knew - that’s why I invited you to the wedding, you know? To see how he’d react. How he’d explain you to me. I never thought that this was… I know that this isn’t easy for him. But that’s his character, isn’t it? He wants to suffer. He thinks he’s supposed to suffer and fight himself as penance for his sins.”

Tom chose his words with care, and made himself hold Clare’s gaze, even though he wanted nothing more than to desert this confrontation.

“If that was true a few years ago, I’m not sure it is anymore. I think John is aware that this… frame of mind… isn’t doing him any favours.”

“It’s one thing to know it and another to do anything about it.”

“What do you want from me?” 

At Clare’s back was a wall of glass bottles, each of them filled with dried flowers. Ever since they’d sat down, Tom had been longing to push one of the bottles off its shelf, just for the satisfying sound it would make as it broke.

“Things can’t go on the way they have,” Clare said. “Where I have to wait for these walks to… to wear off, a few days or a week until he’ll… Oh, for God’s sake. This can’t be comfortable for you either. I want the two of you to stop. I want you to stop going on these trips with him.”

“If I do, it might not make things better,” Tom pointed out. “Why are you asking me, instead of John?”

“Because it’s not about… forcefully keeping him apart from you,” Clare frowned. “That’s not what I… I want him to understand that this can’t go on forever, this pitiful attempt at being a dutiful husband while his mind is on a mountain somewhere. And if we take that from him, he might have to put some thought into what sort of a life he really wants. I’ll have to have a stern talk with him, but it would help, if you didn’t come running each time he calls. Putting an oxygen mask on his face so he can take another breath and last a little longer, without realising that this isn’t how people are supposed to breathe. Breathing should be something you do without thinking.”

“I am angry at him,” Tom admitted, looking down at the shapeless dregs of his tea. “It’s difficult to… to express that anger, when it’s always been rather obvious that he was hurting himself as well as me.”

“Maybe if you’d shouted at him a long time ago, told him in no uncertain terms to sort his shit out, if you’ll forgive me the language, we wouldn’t be where we are today. Now… If he decides that he wants to give our marriage a chance, and he’s willing to try and get over you, I might agree to it. We do love each other, in our own ways. I didn’t go after him just because I wanted a problem to solve. And in that case, maybe it would be better if you kept your distance.”

“Maybe it would be,” Tom agreed, which was hardly a commitment or a promise, but Clare must have understood that under the circumstances, this was the best that she could hope for.

She left soon after, with her tailored coat and her jumper that looked like a white piece of cloud, picking up a handbag and a V&A tote with a heavy-looking binder stashed inside it. 

“I need to go work,” she said, catching him looking at the binder. 

Tom nodded. As neither of them could think of an appropriate goodbye, this was their final interaction: a vague apology and a vague nod, something like understanding passing between them, in spite of the resentment they were both trying to keep in check, acutely aware that it was somewhat undeserved and somewhat misdirected.

Once he was alone, Tom let his mind wander for a moment. He tried to picture them getting into bed together, John and Clare, in a stilted fashion at first, each on their own side of a wide double bed, in a room as sparsely furnished as John’s bedroom in Shoreditch. In that daydream, John wore old-fashioned silk pyjamas and Clare an old-fashioned nightdress, a scene straight out of the 1950s, where they opened magazines and studiously avoided looking each other in the eye. Then Tom let a breeze breathe through the room, blowing the curtains inwards, stroking the leaves of the plants Clare would have put up on every shelf, succulents and a trailing ivy and a Boston fern with its jagged edges and a bird’s nest fern with its leaves like swaying seaweed, and dried flowers in bottles like in the cafe. John and Clare’s clothes were arranged on the back of a chair and a tray lay forgotten on the floor, laden with a kettle and a plate of biscuits and damp tea-bags in a saucer, and the two of them were quietly talking in bed, the covers drawn up.

When they were children, Johnny had told Tom on numerous occasions that he had no imagination, that it was a crying shame, and what games they might have played if Tom only knew how to _pretend._ The way Tom saw it however - long before those five minutes in the cafe where he let his jealousy get the better of him - imagination was a dangerous thing if you let it loose. It wouldn’t have been difficult to imagine himself in Clare’s place. He knew what John’s laughter sounded like, knew how he’d often put a hand over his eyes when he laughed as if he feared being seen in a moment of vulnerability; he knew that if it’d been the two of them, there’d have been a book forgotten at the foot of the bed, and John’s clothes wouldn’t have been folded or tucked away but left in a single, disorderly pile where he might easily sort them out once the overwhelming urge that had led him to drag Tom towards the bed had dissipated. Perhaps there’d have been a framed picture of a glacier on the wall, one of those pictures that Edward had given to Tom and that Tom counted among his most treasured possessions, and on the wall across, they’d have hung that painting of a monk by the seaside that Tom had seen on the wall of John’s living room in Shoreditch, and which he suspected might have been a present from Edward as well, because it was by some German painter that Edward liked. The bookshelf by the window would have been about to collapse under the weight of their books, and John’s small leather-bound Bible would have found its place on the nightstand, next to a book about the recent draining of pockets of water under a French glacier, with a highlighter stuck in the middle as a bookmark. There wouldn’t be any steel kettle or fancy tray, only an empty mug (Tom’s), with a black ring at the bottom where the coffee used to be, and John would recline against the pillow, Tom catching a flash of a smile before he pressed his face against John’s hip, reveling in the heat of his bare skin. _How early is it?_ John would ask. _If we leave now, could we get to the top of Arthur’s Seat before the sun comes up?_

Half an hour before Tom was due to meet John, he sent him a text.

_I’m giving you some time, as you asked. Goodbye._

40.

_(A text? A text?! Seriously, Tom?)_

_(I wasn’t going to… to ghost him, or anything like that. He called me right after I sent that text. It wasn’t… It wasn’t a pleasant conversation.)_

“Is this an ultimatum?”

John sounded angry, but Tom had discovered a while back that when it came to John, harsh words were often a means to disguise an overwhelming sort of panic.

“Of course not,” Tom answered, wishing he’d had more time to think about what he should say, feeling as if he’d set off across one of his glaciers with only a pair of sneakers, slipping all the way.

“Did Clare tell you not to come?”

“She asked me not to,” Tom corrected. “But I think she has a point. I’ve never minded whether my life was comfortable or not, but you and her, you certainly deserve better than our current… situation.”

“Are you renouncing me?”

“You renounced me four years ago,” Tom reminded him, and heard John’s breath catch in his throat.

“I tried, Tom. I tried but it was the worst thing I’ve ever done. Please don’t do this. I’m not saying I don’t deserve it, I certainly do, but I’m begging you not to.”

Tom rubbed at his forehead, at the headache building between his eyes.

“I don’t know any other way to do this. I don’t know if I should be telling you that it’s not enough anymore? I don’t feel like I have a right to say that it’s all or nothing. What I can say is, I’m giving you time. And if you figure out a way forward that’s not just us… trying to climb mountains with our hands tied behind our backs, you know where to find me. Until then, it’s probably better if we go our separate ways.”

41.

Johnny shakes his head from his perch on the windowsill. 

“I think I know where this is going.”

“Do you?”

“I do,” Johnny nods, picking up the discarded orange peel at his side to drop it inside his empty coffee cup. Tom couldn’t say how many cups of coffee Johnny has drunk since he arrived, or how many oranges he ate, but if he had to make a wild guess, he’d go with a dozen of each. “You got tired of waiting and threw yourself into a crevasse so he’ll be forced to face how much he loves you…”

“Don’t be stupid. I told you it was an accident. Please don’t make that sort of joke in front of mum, I think she’ll fail to see the humour...”

“And I think you underestimate her ability to swallow hardships like a pot of over-brewed tea.” Johnny makes a discrete grimace, which Tom assumes must be an imitation of their mother’s face whenever their old neighbour serves her one of his infamous cups of pitch-black brew.

“Johnny…”

“It’s fine,” Johnny sighs. “I’ve heard her say, not once but twice, that any man you’ll bring home in the future can only be an improvement on Roland.”

“Oh, here we go again... Could we forget that Roland ever happened?”

“Happened does happen to be the right verb. Like artists talk about happenings, and the art of performance. Roland was, indeed, a work of art in motion, to be experienced, rather than seen.”

“You’re unbelievable,” Tom groans, as he nudges his phone to check the time.

Immediately his eyes are drawn to the notifications beneath the clock, two messages from John in quick succession.

_I won’t trouble you needlessly_

_But could you please let me know if you’re alright?_

Behind the brief question Tom can picture John frowning at his phone, reasoning with himself that he’s allowed to ask Tom how he’s doing, that he’s not overstepping any boundaries.

_Will I see you this week-end?_ Tom writes back. _It would greatly help with my recovery_

“What did happen, between then and now?” Johnny asks, the humour foregone, his curiosity taking the helm.

“I didn’t hear about John much,” Tom answers, turning his phone over on the bedside table so he won’t be tempted to glance at it every five seconds. “Not unless I was hiking, and even then, as I said, it was only… where I was going, and for how long, and so on.” He doesn’t try to get into how it had felt, to keep sending those messages - how difficult it had been, to go against a decision he’d known without a doubt had been the right one, and yet, in a contradictory way, how easy it had been, also, to plan those walks for the sole purpose of betraying his resolve.

Johnny hadn’t been too far off the mark. Tom hadn’t fallen into that crevasse on purpose, but when he’d been invited along on a climb by two scientists at the conference he’d been attending, he’d found an excuse not to go, just so he could run off on his own once again, secure in the knowledge that John was waiting for his return.

“In the end, when I did get news, it wasn’t from John, not directly.”

He’d received an email from Graham. Graham being the last person who’d indulge in gossip, most of the email consisted in an extensive account of his recent ski trip to the Alps, complete with remarks about the lack of snow in the lower resorts and a mention of how Graham had had a drink below the Mer de Glace and had been stunned by the glacier’s retreat. _Your job can’t be an easy one. You have all my admiration, my friend,_ he wrote, going on to say that the Gores had no sooner come back that they’d started to look into setting up an annual collection among their friends, which would be distributed to various environmental NGOs. As always, Tom had tried to think of a way to explain to Graham that he was part of the problem, with his unethical job and his rich friends who flew private helicopters to the top of mountains in Austria and Switzerland, in order to get the best snow during their little ski getaways.

The last paragraph of the email had derailed that train of thought entirely.

_Irving has been sleeping in our guest room for the past week, following his separation from Clare. The two of them seem to be doing well, considering... Clare is hard at work on her next play and John has been looking at job opportunities in Scotland. I thought you should know._

Tom reread the email several times, particularly the last line, and he wondered how much Graham knew, exactly, and for how long he’d known. It might have been days - it might have been a decade. If he’d guessed anything, it sounded much like him to decide that he’d be better off pretending he didn’t, waiting for John and Tom to tell him in their own time. Consequently, it couldn’t be meaningless that he’d chosen this moment to intervene.

_I thought you should know._

Tom’s reply barely made any mention of Graham’s revelation, aside from a neutral sentence about how he wished John and Clare the best, and he didn’t get much occasion to talk to Graham after that.

But he did send John a text, some time after Graham’s initial email.

_Stumbled upon one of your drawings in one of my books. I was wondering where the title came from. “We see the same stars”? Don’t worry if you can’t remember. Just being curious_

Then he waited to see what John would do: if he’d grab the lifeline that Tom had thrown his way, or toss it back into the water.

“Well, what did he say?” Johnny asks. “Cut to the chase.”

“It’s just that… it took me a while to understand that with John, you have to read between the lines.”

_John is the sort of person who’ll put three dots at the start of a quote and leave that silence unfilled for the next seven years._

“And someone else would have thought to do that, but it took me a lot of time, to... To look past the way he presented himself, the way he behaved, to see what he really was like, and how scared he was. It’d be easy to hang it all on him, but really I was an idiot for many of those years as well,” Tom finishes, precisely as a faintly familiar face appears around the door. 

Dark curly hair and large brown eyes, and a thick black beard that fails to hide a beaming smile.

“Bloody hell,” Max says, the “h” going entirely unheard. “If it isn’t Tom Hartnell.”

42.

“I can’t stay long, the prof is waiting for us, and your mother too, I think? After all this time, I will finally meet her!”

Tom catches Johnny’s amused smile. When he’d started dating Max, he’d worried that Johnny wouldn’t like him. Now the idea seems preposterous. Of course Johnny and Max would get along, the both of them being cocky, ebullient men with a similarly terrible sense of humour. Most of Max’s jokes used to go over Tom’s head, back in the day, because his grasp of French was limited and while Max’s English was perfectly decent, he had a tendency to translate his thoughts literally from one language to the next, so that much of his meaning got lost along the way. Their first conversation, which took place on the little train leading up to the Mer de Glace, had involved Max trying to tell him about a French commercial, something about a marmot wrapping chocolate bars in tinfoil. Tom will never forget how humiliated he’d felt, as Max tried again and again to explain the same story and Tom still failed to get the punchline. It was only when they’d got off the train and Max was striding ahead that Charrière had given Tom’s shoulder a reassuring tap and told him, _He’s not trying to be mean, he just wants to be your friend._ As it turned out, Tom had the necessary patience to endure Max’s enthusiastic rambles, while Max didn’t mind that Tom didn’t speak often. More importantly maybe, he knew how to listen, when Tom did speak.

“Thank you for dropping by,” Tom says, “and I can never thank you enough for…”

“Yes, yes, we weren’t going to leave you on the mountain to die. I like to think that you would come and get me if I was lost on a little British hill.” 

Despite Max’s carefree tone, Tom hasn’t missed his swift glance of appraisal, taking in Tom’s tired face and the bruise over his cheekbone and his bandaged feet. 

“Max, it’s been a while,” Johnny says, moving forward to shake his hand, and Tom gladly lets him take over the conversation, with a fast tirade about the comforts of modern hospitals as he demonstrates how he’s been playing a game of musical chairs between the plastic chair and the window ledge and the edge of the bed, unable to decide which post is the most uncomfortable.

“You’d think it’d be that ledge, but after a day in the sun it’s burning hot, and I do like to feel like my arse is on fire… What’s Max short for, by the way, Maximus?”

“Maxence. But that’s only for my mother when she’s pissed at me. And speaking of mothers, when I left yours, Emile… The professeur, he was going to serve the aperitif. Do you know génépi? It is a traditional drink here. The professeur makes his own, he goes to the mountain to collect the herbs and he prepares them with sugar and alcohol. It is very strong, maybe your mother won’t like it.”

“Alpine moonshine! I can’t believe I’m missing that. It would make this entire trip worthwhile - no offence to you,” Johnny adds generously, as he squeezes Tom’s knee.

“There might be some left if you go now,” Tom remarks.

After the bustle of the last few minutes, the idea of being alone for the evening has stopped being unappealing.

“What about the end of my story?”

“You know the ending.” Tom tries to shrug and sucks in a sharp breath when the gesture pulls at a few bruises. “You were there.”

“Not good enough,” Johnny warns him. “You won’t get away so easily. Granted, it’s been a long day... We may reconvene tomorrow for the grand finale. I’ll swing by the bathroom before we go, give you guys a minute to catch up. ”

“Your brother is like a… an electric battery,” Max says once Johnny’s left, shaking his head in disbelief. “What did the doctors say about your feet?”

“That I should be okay, but I’m going to be stuck here for another week, at least... How are you? How’s the lab?”

Max sits down at the edge of the bed. 

“The lab is fine. I’m actually working on the Mont Blanc next month, for the Project Ice Memory. When your country is done spitting on Europe, maybe you’ll be ready for a bit of Antarctic cooperation.”

“There’s no need to twist the knife,” Tom says, but it’s as difficult to be annoyed with Max as it is to hold a grudge against Johnny, and besides, he wants to know more. “So have you started putting samples in the vault, then? It’s ready?”

Max doesn’t need much encouragement to launch into a detailed explanation about the professeur’s last trip to Antarctica, to work with a team of Italian scientists on the storage of ice samples from glaciers around the world, in a vault built under the ice near the French-Italian station Concordia. 

“I was in Bolivia earlier this year, and we had to carry down the cores on foot because we couldn’t get a helicopter…”

When Johnny returns, Max’s story circles back to the vault (“I heard you talking about an underground cave!”), as Max tries to explain to Johnny how the vault was built (“We removed the snow and put a balloon inside the hole to make the shape of the vault, and then we put snow back over the balloon and when the ice is ready, we…” - “Deflate,” Tom provides - “... Deflate the balloon, and take it out…”).

When a nurse arrives to remind them that the visiting hours are coming to an end, the three of them are gathered around Max’s phone, looking at a video of a group of scientists making a similar cave in Greenland, and Tom has no doubt that if she hadn’t come in, Johnny could easily have come up with another hour’s worth of questions (“But don’t you run the risk of it collapsing on itself?”, “What about the ice melting, won’t the cave be exposed soon? Or you’d have to dig really deep, but then in terms of accessing it…”, “Do you really believe you could get scientists from all around the world collaborating on a project like this, without any political drawbacks?”).

It’s only when Max is about to leave that Tom finally remembers the name of his partner, the science teacher with whom he’d been building a chalet a few years ago, when they’d last come across each other.

“How’s Gaspard?”

“Very good,” Max grins. “The house isn’t finished, tu te rends compte! But we can live in it now. And my sister bought the land next to us and with her husband they will build their chalet there. What about you?”

Tom and Johnny exchange a look.

“Tom hasn’t quite reached the house-building stage yet.”

Tom glances at his phone and fails to keep the smile out of his voice as he adds, “He’ll be back the day after tomorrow.”

“Ah, you mean John Irving,” Max says, as Tom looks up in surprise. “Yes, I saw him. The other day, after we brought you in. He’s changed, hasn’t he? He looks less…” Unable to find the right word, he lifts his chin and shakes his shoulders a little, to mime a person giving themselves some airs.

“Pedantic?” Johnny supplies. “Stuck up? Arrogant? Revoltingly well-off?”

“Yes,” Max says, with another wry grin. “All of that.”

“I think it’s time for the two of you to leave,” Tom frowns.

43.

Tom can’t be sure that he remembers the exact moment when it happened. Maybe he’s imagining it: putting his foot down on the wrong patch of snow, how he had time to think, _No,_ very clearly, the abrupt horror of it, as the late afternoon light vanished in the blink of an eye and he went down in a cloud of ice and water and snow. 

He didn’t fall straight down but glanced off several ridges before his upper body slammed hard against a block of ice. For a moment he didn’t move, draped over what must have been a fallen chunk of ice, wedged deep into the side of the crevasse. His legs dangled in the air. It was some time before he could settle his wheezing breath. At that point, he had no idea how deep inside the glacier he’d fallen, though he’d felt a surge of panic each time he went down further, aware that if he didn’t break his neck, each new tumble added that many more feet that he’d have to climb back up. Because he’d have to climb out; it went without question. He wouldn’t waste the last of his strength waiting at the bottom of a glacier for some improbable rescue (or, a far likelier outcome, for the cold to get him). 

Tom had rarely been frightened of glaciers before, of the mountains or of the ice, and yet down on that ledge, 70 feet below the surface, hundreds of feet above the bottom of the glacier that he could only guess at in the darkness beyond the bright yellow beam of his headlamp, his immediate surroundings bringing to mind the fan-vaults of a cathedral or perhaps a melting cake, ice dripping into water and carrying on a steady conversation, falling droplets answering the crush and cracks and groans of whatever was moving underneath, the ice or some antediluvian monster stirring from its sleep, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched. The last time he’d had such a feeling, it’d been in the Arctic during that first expedition, when as they headed northwards he’d thought he’d seen a beast following in their tracks (“a bear,” he’d said, although it didn’t look like a polar bear, not exactly, its neck was too long at times, and instead of the elongated snout the creature had a flat muzzle and in Tom’s dreams it looked like a face). It had been a hallucination in the Arctic and he tried to remind himself that it was even less likely he’d come across any strange creature down in a crevasse. The glint of eyes he’d seen was little more than light reflecting off the ice, the slow shift of muscles along a powerful back was the beginning of a dizzy spell, as the walls of the crevasse began to undulate before his eyes. How often he’d heard stories of exhausted mountaineers whose oxygen-deprived brains had manifested a shadow walking in their tracks, the imaginary last man in their party, tethered to them by a ghostly rope that they swore they’d not only seen but held in their frostbitten hands.

Down in that glacier, however, Tom was reminded in the cruelest ways that even the most rational mind can fall prey to irrational fears, and he had to climb out, pulling himself up from one snow-covered ledge to the next, keeping his eyes and his torch beam upfront on the ice axes he clutched in each hand, wasting precious energy breathing too fast, choking on the thin mountain air, with this enduring awareness that a hulking figure was waiting below him, slowly edging closer, slithering over ledges and ridges as it prepared to pounce. It was all he could do to tell himself that his axes were sharp enough, and that if he were to turn around, he might yet stab the beast before it bore him down.

He left his silent companion inside the glacier, wondering, as he dragged himself out and stumbled a few feet away in the snow, when they’d meet again. Under the night sky, it was easier to be kinder to himself, and to remember a conversation he’d once had with Thomas Blanky, something about “taking one’s demons to the ice and dancing with them, forks ringing”, unless it had been “thoughts ringing,” which hardly made more sense, but Tom was past making sense by that point, navigating the glacier by instinct alone, trusting his feet not to lead him down another ice shaft, and he’d allowed his brain to pretend that if he could just make it another few feet - not too much farther now, only another hundred, only another fifty, and another fifty, and another - he’d stumble against the metal sheeting of the refuge, and John would be waiting for him inside, tending to the fire.

The others must have found him wandering near the glacier terminus, unless he’d already stepped off the ice and begun to clamber down the moraine below. He has a clearer memory of his arrival at the refuge than he does of this rescue - he remembers how John came forward to greet him, and what he was wearing, a faded blue jumper Tom hadn’t seen on him since university, and how the scratchy wool had felt almost soft under his cheek as he let his head drop on John’s shoulder, and he could have cried from the relief of it, of being back in that tin box where he’d once been happy, holding on to a memory of being held.

44.

After the first night at the ER, they’d moved him to a small room, with an empty space where the second bed should have been and a window overlooking the parking lot with another hospital building across from it; the mountains barring the horizon behind it, dark green and black and quiescent during the day, haloed in purple and blues at dawn and dusk. 

Tom was lethargic for most of the day that John spent alone at his bedside, and by the time he’d recovered enough to carry on a prolonged conversation, or even merely to sit up and speak for more than a minute without falling asleep and forgetting whatever it was he’d just said, the rest of them had arrived, Crozier with a few choice words about French roads and his mother with provisions and Johnny with that easy grin that Tom had so envied as they grew up. Although Tom’s eyes kept straying towards John, whenever and wherever he was in the room, the two of them were hardly given a moment alone until the afternoon of Tom’s third day at the hospital, when everyone left under various pretexts and John stayed behind, sitting in what would soon become Johnny’s designated plastic chair.

“Are you alright?” Tom asked, once Johnny had disappeared, his familiar tread echoing down the corridor.

“Am I alright?” John repeated. “You’re asking me?”

“You look like you could use some sleep,” Tom ventured. 

In fact, with his startled blue eyes, John looked high as a kite. Several times over the last few hours, Tom had seen him either fidgeting in some very caffeinated attempt at staying awake, or beginning to nod off where he stood, catching himself with a sudden jerk and blink.

“I’m fine,” John said. “As fine as I could be. We’ve talked about this, although you might not remember it... It was years ago. The idea that… That you could fall off a mountain, or fall into a glacier in another country, at the other end of the world… And by the time I find out that something has happened to you, you’ll either have made it or died, and the… the impotence of it…”

“I’m sorry. I should never have asked you to… to act as my next of kin, so to speak.” 

The thought had been on Tom’s mind ever since he’d woken up to find John anxiously watching over him. It was all well and good to revel in the idea that John alone knew where he was, as long as nothing happened to him. Tom had never really taken into consideration the weight of responsibility that he was placing on John, because he’d somehow failed to consider that he might indeed run into trouble. 

“In the future I won’t…”

“You misunderstand me,” John interrupted him. “This wasn’t a reproach, I’m under no illusion that you’re going to turn your life around and stop gallivanting on the ice. Don’t you laugh! I was… I wanted to… I was trying to regain my footing before I reached out to you. I know that Graham told you that Clare and I… That we’d separated. Heaven’s sake. I didn’t mean for us to have this conversation now, my plane leaves in a few hours and you must be exhausted.”

“We are having this conversation, now,” Tom told him, sitting up as well he could against his pillow. Something in John’s tone had caused his heart to start hammering inside his chest.

John was fidgeting again, twisting his hands, though it now occurred to Tom that this anxious demeanour may have less to do with exhaustion and caffeine than with him having had to wait hours if not days (and perhaps far longer than that) to finally speak his mind. 

“This has made me realise… rather plainly… that I’d rather stay as close as I can, if you’d let me. For as long as I can. This is what should come first, and not logistics, or… good behaviour, or principles or pride or… or religion. Taking into account that we lead very different lives, of course…”

“We don’t,” Tom said. “Or… We have different jobs, and I’m far more used to hanging around the sort of left-wing scientists who show up at marches for the environment than…Than the people you and Graham like to dine with. I don’t go to church, and I don’t think I ever will. But this has never been an obstacle to us getting along, has it? Not since university.”

“I was trying to say that I understand that you have to travel far and wide,” John said. “And now that I’ve moved back to Edinburgh, it will be an added train journey to visit each other… I did intend to come see you in the autumn. Or rather, I was going to visit Edward and use the occasion to test the waters. And if you’d rather wait until then, I would understand, because I’m springing this on you at the worst possible…”

“John,” Tom said, with fond exasperation, “what have I ever done to make you think I would rather wait than be with you?”

John’s smile was as sudden as it was short-lived. He leaned forwards, hands pressed against his forehead, and it wasn’t until a tremor ran through him that Tom realised he was crying.

“John?”

“I’m so sorry. I’m so…” 

“Can you get over here?” Tom asked, trying to keep his tone light. “I’d like to touch you but I can’t really get up…”

John quickly rubbed his eyes. He cleared his throat.

“And now I’m making a scene. I’m truly sorry. You’d think I was the one who’d been through a traumatic accident...”

“I’d be in a right state if anything had happened to you. Can you come over here and kiss me now? Please. Before the cavalry returns.”

This time John did come closer, and until he left to catch his plane, little else was said, as John gradually gave up on treating Tom like glass and let himself be pulled halfway onto the bed, Tom guiding his hands where they wouldn’t encounter a bruise (where he wanted them), to his hip, his neck, forgetting how tired and sore he was, how confused and how restless he’d felt for the past few months, in favour of smiling against John’s mouth, of worrying John’s lower lip with his teeth. John made a close-mouthed sound of protest before he chased Tom back against the pillow, “No, you can do that again, please, bite me again.” 

Tom obeyed, wishing he could pull John even closer, wondering whether he might not distract him enough that he would indeed miss his plane, and to hell with the consequences. When John drew back for breath, with ruffled hair and swollen lips, his gaze soft with a sort of languor, the freckles prominent across the bridge of his nose because it was the beginning of summer and outside the hospital the light was golden and warm - Tom took the occasion to say, “I’m sure I smell like hospital soap and I must taste like hospital food, I’m sorry about that.” 

“I didn’t exactly pause long enough to pack my cologne,” John said. Knowing him, it was likely he meant it as an apology rather than as a joke. 

As the time of his flight drew near, he did eventually rise from the bed and went to pick up his trench coat. 

“If I don’t go, I’ll miss my plane. But I could be back… Saturday? If you like?”

Tom had always thought of himself as being even-tempered, prone to quiet contentment and equally quiet bouts of annoyance or irritation. He couldn’t have said if the wild surge of happiness he felt just then was something new, or perhaps the drugs they’d given him, meddling with his brain.

45.

Johnny sends Tom a short video of the professeur’s garden, of a plastic table covered with large plates of charcuterie, saucisson and salami and ham and cured ham, and plates of various types of cheese among which Tom thinks he recognises the tomme with its black rind that Astrid used to fetch at her uncle’s dairy. Everyone is raising glasses of a green liquid, which must be the liquor Max had told them about. Astrid is there, her chestnut brown hair in a plait over her shoulder, and the professeur’s wife and a diffident-looking fellow who must be Max’s partner. Johnny diligently films the toast in Tom’s honour before he flips the camera around so Tom will see him downing his drink in a single swallow, his face contorting in a grimace of surprise, “Fuck! That’s strong.”

Tom might be alone in his hospital room, the visits of doctors and nurses becoming less frequent as the sky grows dark, but it fast turns out to be one of the most companionable evenings he’s ever spent. Every hour brings more well wishes, text messages and emails and voicemails that he listens to discreetly because the hospital has a no phone calls policy. There’s the messages he hadn’t had time to read earlier, including a three-line email from his father who’s never been much of a talker, and Tom feels a rare pang of sadness as he thinks of him sitting alone in his garden in Gillingham, never mind that his father wouldn’t understand, with his lifelong longing for a quiet, immutable life. Graham buried a discrete question about John’s visit in a long paragraph about the comings and goings of every single person they both know in Cambridge and London. Edward’s boyfriend Thomas reminds Tom that in Edward’s absence, he’s been left with Tom’s spare keys and is willing to fetch anything Tom might need from his flat. 

Some of the messages Tom was expecting at this point, such as Edward having finally found enough signal to reach out to him _(I was on a fishing boat and I’m about to head back out for 2 days but I’ll be in Murmansk next week, I’ll call you. Please take care of yourself and if you need anything give Thomas a call)._ Others come as something of a surprise, like James Fitzjames’ long voicemail, where he covers not only Tom’s current predicament but also their hillwalking days and the preparations of his marriage with Crozier, or a “Get well!” text that arrives seconds before a selfie of Dundy and Charlotte standing side by side on the top of a Peruvian mountain, ruthlessly stylish with their patterned scarves and designer shades.

John has sent him his flight times, and a picture of the blue sky above the castle in Edinburgh.

Tom thinks about George Mallory. Not Mallory the mountaineer, who may or may not have been the first to summit Mount Everest; not the Mallory who wrote loving letters to his wife from the slopes of the world’s highest mountain; but the George Mallory who’d studied history at Cambridge. 

_George Mallory?_ (Tom can’t quite remember Edward’s tone, because he could go on for hours in the same even voice sometimes, RP English at its finest, but he does remember how Edward had been amused by that conversation. He’d smiled his lopsided smile:) _Do you know he rowed for his college in Cambridge? He used to run along with the future members of the Bloomsbury group, flirted with quite a few of them - a few men, I mean. Homoeroticism at its finest, the cult of the athlete’s body… Duncan Grant did a few paintings of Mallory in the nude. And then he left Cambridge, married a woman: isn’t that how it usually goes?_

When Edward returns from whatever icy city he’s sailed to, Tom might pick up this discussion again; lead it to a different conclusion.

 _Goodnight and great love to you,_ he types, and though he sends the message to John, in this moment he might have passed it on to the others as well, in the French Alps and the English countryside, in the Peruvian Andes and the Russian far north and on the melting slopes of the Himalayas.

He’s hardly forgotten the many good reasons why he should be worried, but for the time being, he figures they might hold off until the next morning. 

When he wakes up, the mountains will still be there. John will still be there. And for a while longer, the glaciers too.

**Author's Note:**

> If you made it to the end of this story, I would love to hear from you.


End file.
